I haven't hosted a watch party persay, but I have shared a lot of documentaries with my close friends and family. Kiss the Ground is my favorite one for its much more optimistic tone compared to other documentaries, but I also like the Broken and Rotten docuseries to show systemic issues in different parts of society.

I think it's fascinating how different cities like San Diego and New York handle all their different types of waste. I've been learning more about the different facilities around Fort Wayne just from being a homeowner with a lot of extra junk from previous occupants that I want to dispose of properly. We're lucky that Fort Wayne has a decent infrastructure to handle our waste and that organizations like ACDEM create resources to help our community.

I actually visited the landfill the other week and was surprised how close it was to Eagle Marsh. It seems very out of the way to have an impact on people. However, when I used the EPA's ESJScreen tool, it showed that air pollution and other negative environmental effects clearly affected the low-income areas of the city more than other areas.

Like most systems in societies, the environments that people live in are inherently unfair due to old (and still existing) policy decisions. I hope as cities like Fort Wayne continue to expand, they looks into ways to care not just for the environment, but also all the people that live in it.

Plastic is a truly amazing material that deserves to be respected as something more than just disposable. I hope that we get to the point where no one thinks in terms of single-use anymore and always strives to have reusable on hand.

At the end of the day, the history and purpose of especially single use plastics just disgusts me. Despite humanity's clear negative impact on the planet, we continue to produce waste at a rapid pace exclusively for our own gain, whether convenience or money. It's disturbing!

Bioplastics are at a basic level just plastics made from biological sources instead of petroleum. Some of them are chemically-indistinguishable from regular plastics while others have the potential to degrade faster when properly disposed of (composted in industrial settings). I think bioplastics have their place and finding alternatives to petroleum-based materials and ingredients allows our country to be less reliant on oil imports and will give us more options in the future when the world's petroleum reserves run out. However, I think reducing our reliance on plastic in any form will help us more in the long run. Our city doesn't explicitly say whether they take bioplastics or not, but I know that Dirt Wain and Ground Down both accept certified-compostable bioplastics in their paid composting services.

I really liked the video by the Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers and the solutions that they listed. I think encouraging companies and governments at every level to make labeling more clear and make packaging easier to recycle. We can do our best as individuals, but at the end of the day, the change has to come from all the stages of the plastic lifecycle that comes before us.