Cities in the U.S. are starting to catch on to the fact that polystyrene is destroying the environment.

Let me just clarify first that polystyrene is Styrofoam. Styrofoam is the leading polystyrene brand by Dow Chemical Company – kind of like how brand Band-Aids has become the generic term for bandages. Whether it’s the packing peanuts in shipping boxes or polystyrene cups and bowls, foam is used as a cheap alternative in our everyday lives.

Polystyrene causes a ton of problems:

• It never biodegrades. Let me emphasize that one more time. It never biodegrades. It only breaks into smaller pieces, making environmental cleanup harder than ever. Also, wildlife often mistake those small pieces for food, and the polystyrene and toxins degrade their health and digestive systems.
• It's made of fossil fuels and synthetic chemicals. That means those toxins are leaching out of those polystyrene bowls and cups and into the food we're eating.
• You can’t recycle it. It's completely useless after only one use.

Lots of U.S. cities have successfully passed legislation making it illegal for local businesses and organizations to use foam products (mostly used in restaurants), but the law doesn’t include packaging from outside of the district.

Some of these cities include: New York City, DC, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis and San Francisco.

I recently wrote about an amazing environmental summer program in DC that I was able to participate in last month. During the program, I had the opportunity to take a boat tour of the Anacostia River which runs through DC. We learned about the history of the river, the problems it faces and what is currently being done to clean it up.

For the past 140 years, the Anacostia has been reduced to a dump of chemicals, toxic waste, sewage and trash. You name it, the Anacostia has probably seen it. Once regulations were passed, people started to make an effort to clean up the river. Tests were done, and the number one trash pollutant in the river was – you guessed it – foam. When DC banned polystyrene, the Anacostia improved a good bit. Although it is still unsuitable for swimming, it has certainly come a long way.

Read more about the Anacostia Watershed Society here.

I mean, look at the Chattahoochee in Atlanta!

This year, the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Basin in Alabama, Georgia and Florida was dubbed the most endangered river in America. That’s insane. I’ve grown up near the Chattahoochee River, but I have never actually swam in it because the river's so incredibly polluted! And like the Anacostia, I think banning polystyrene in Atlanta would help remedy the problem a least a little bit.

Seriously – so many other cities have done it successfully, so there's absolutely no reason we couldn’t ban foam here in Atlanta!

Take my high school, for example. I go to a small high school north of Atlanta. Including faculty, there are probably 300 to 350 people in my school. We use Styrofoam bowls in the cafeteria because they are more convenient than washing reusable ones and because they are cheaper than an environmentally responsible alternative. Say we are in school 180 days a year, and everyday, everyone uses one (and that is very conservative) of those bowls. Do the math: that means that my small high school alone uses well over 58,000 Styrofoam bowls every year. That's absurd when you consider how small of a school it is and how many other schools and workplaces out there do the same exact thing – most of the time on a much, much larger scale.

The solution is simple. Refuse the foam! Use reusable alternatives!

Americans throw away 25 billion foam cups every year. Encourage your school or workplace to replace their polystyrene with a reusable or biodegradable alternative. If you go to my school and happen to be reading this, I would highly encourage you to think twice before grabbing that foam bowl in the cafeteria. I didn’t use a single one this past year, and you can definitely do without it too! I’m a big believer in "every little bit counts".

So make the choice to refuse the foam because everyone has the ability to make a difference!