I've always been obsessed with beauty and self-care and an avid consumer of cosmetic, skin and hair care products. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, a country where it's hot and humid all the time and has limited resources, it's a rather challenging obsession to have. One does not have the advantage of cold to cover with layers or tame frizzy hair nor does one have easy access to many new products and industry treatments. My country has built a reputation around the beauty industry because our women (and sometimes even our men) are highly concerned with the way they look. Beauty salons are a dime a dozen, as well as nail parlors, spas and cosmetologists.
While growing up (for me) nobody around me was really that concerned with pollution or the environment. I hadn't heard of a recycling program until I came to live in the USA for undergraduate school. I wasn't very aware of how big a pollution and trash problem my country specifically had. Granted, that many many countries have this issue. But very few of them rely on tourism of their natural ecosystems as one of their primary sources of income if not their primary one.
In the recent years the DR has been featured in news all over the world due to the heavy pollution and trash problem to the shame of many of us that form a part of the community. As far as I know, since then, very little has been done to fix or ameliorate the issue.
I found a couple of stories that illustrate this issue for the world in general which I found interesting.
This article is about who people think should be responsible for the waste in everyday life and what they are willing to do about it. The opinions varied by country that were even in close proximity to each other. What I found interesting about this is that as a whole we can't even decide who should be responsible for making changes to help with this issue to begin with which doesn't give me much hope of a solution. being found.
This article attempts to explain the issue of plastic pollution, where it comes from and the amounts of it. Primarily, its focus is to explain that the real issue is the inadequacy with which plastic is managed after discarded. I found this interesting because many marketing strategies now a days concentrate on selling you "green" and "biodegradable" products that have high price tags but nobody concentrates on the problem of managing the existing (and growing) amounts of plastic already lying about.
For this class I'd like to explore in a visual way a series of things to the extent that is permitted with the amount of information I may find:
- How much of the waste in today's world comes from the beauty industry?
- How much of it can be managed?
- How much can be prevented without secondary repercussions to the environment?
- What's the impact of the beauty industry on natural ecosystems like the DR's?
- Projections of marine life and ecosystem state in 10 - 20 years.
- What would be the effect of X amount of people like me switching to a completely sustainable routine?
- What is the correlation of education and pollution levels?
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