Seyi Adekoya

When I first read about this, this seemed like a hard task for me to undertake. When I actually thought about practically implementing this, I realized that I basically do this already! I'll usually have cereal in the morning, a salad for lunch, and then when I'm feeling lazy for dinner I'll usually eat something out that has meat in it. Sometimes I'm lazy and I'll end up getting something quick with meat in it for lunch, so more recently my focus has been on limiting myself to eating out/eating meat only once a day. To make it a little "harder", I'm trying not to eat meat everyday! A friend of mine recently made me a curry with chickpeas which I thought was so good, I asked her for the recipe and made it for myself the other day and ate it for a couple meals over the week. I think what also helps me in this process is the fact that I don't particularly like cooking beef and chicken. I'd usually make a meal and not use all of the beef/chicken, and then it would quickly spoil in my fridge (which I hate the smell/thought of). Seeking non-meat options for my favorite meal is going to be a welcome challenge as I try to eat meat less than 7 times a week!

I've recycled my whole life without ever looking into what can and cannot be recycled. I've generally just recycled anything that bore the recycle symbol or that was made of paper/plastic. Doing a little research, I'm SHOCKED to discover that just because items have the recycle symbol did not mean that they were actually getting recycled. What an absolute shite system! I'm not sure if this is banned yet but it looks like people are appealing for this misleading concept to be removed from packaging. It's actually depressing to think about everything that I've "recycled" over the years, thinking I was doing a good thing when it's not so. Going forward, I'm going to pay a lot more attention when recycling. I'm printing out a list of recyclable materials/numbers and posting it above my recycling bin so that I (and hopefully my roommate!) can reference the list and recycle responsibly.

What I really loved about our first writing project was exploring solar panels, which is something I've been interested in since I first learned about them in middle school. My parents have just moved to a home in Arizona, which obviously gets a lot of sunshine and I think will be an ideal spot for solar panels. Being from Seattle, I never thought that it would make sense to have solar panels in an overwhelmingly overcast city. However, through my research, I found that solar might actually make sense to install in Seattle! The main problem that would prevent solar in Seattle (or in any location) would be whether the infrastructure around my home/Seattle would be able to support them. One of the articles I found talked about how there are enough solar energy projects backlogged to fueled the majority of the clean energy transition in the US by 2030, but a lack of infrastructure is holding it up. I'm planning on presenting the pros/cons of solar panels in both Seattle and Arizona to my parents, as I've been trying to convince them to install solar now that they've moved to Arizona.

Changing my lightbulbs was actually a win/win for me in this situation! I spend a lot of my time studying in my room and I was unhappy with the level of light in my room. It was a little too dark for my liking, and I figured that I could solve that by changing my lightbulbs. In a Physics course that I took last Spring I learned about LED lightbulbs and how they can save energy and money if you switch to LED lights, so I looked into getting LED bulbs. I bought these super cool Philips Hue LED lightbulbs that allow me to change the color of the bulbs to any color on the light spectrum, which is amazing. I often have the lights a warm yellow in the morning, a very bright white when i'm studying, and a sunset-like mix of colors in the evening when I'm just relaxing in my room. Something else I learned in my Physics class was that you can save $31 per lightbulb you switch from incandescent to LED. We calculated that if UCLA switched all their lightbulbs to LED (and approximating that UCLA has 100,000 lightbulbs), they could save $3 million dollars a year.

Back in 2017 I had just moved back to Seattle from LA and I was in the market to purchase a new vehicle. My parents had suggested one car or another for me to purchase, but I personally knew what I wanted from my own first car. When I was in high school, my parents would let me drive around their Toyota Prius and I fell in love with hybrid cars. I would treat the MPG meter as my own video game, and I would intentionally drive slower, cruise down large hills, and activate "Eco Mode" so that I could increase the charge on the battery and conserve energy. After shopping around, I settled on my current car: a Honda Accord Hybrid.

In 2017 I was driving an average of 50 miles a day, commuting from my parents' home to work and back. Using a car carbon footprint calculator, my estimated weekly CO2 product was 0.146 tons. If I were to have bought a non-hybrid, my estimated weekly C02 production would have been 0.225 tons. I was able to produce 35% less emissions by opting for a hybrid than a standard engine. I still have my car to this day and have used it for a lot of my interstate travels! I've driven from OKC to KC to PHX to SD and to LA! While I love my car, I do dream of my next vehicular purchase in a couple of years and I am very much looking forward to owning a fully electric vehicle.

*attached photo is my MPG meter in my car, featuring Benny Blanco in the back.