Autonomous work - Justine

Hi !
Today for my Thursday’s autonomous work, I watched again videos on the website « Ororo », about some different subjects.
The first one is an answer to the question “Why advertisers are tracking your emoji” ?
Toyota is able to target more than 80 twitter ads just based on emoji use.
Since 2016, advertisers can collect emojis on Twitter such as the other personal data. They can know who is posting what, when, and which emojis are the most popular. Then the brands use them in their ads. For example, if you use a pizza emoji, Domino’s will reply with a coupon. If you tweet an emoji to google, they will give you a link for the top search results on their platform. If you use an eye hearted emoji, Toyota will understand you are in a good mood, and will make you have the ad in your feed.
Some emojis are ambiguous, and so advertisers use artificial intelligence to know in which context it is used.
It is also a way to propose the ad to people who will not leave bad comments on the brand, because they can know how they feel. For example, Trump made a bad tweet about Toyota, and then many people were talking about this brand, but in a bad way. Toyota is able to know whom, and not to send the ads to those people, but to others.
For now, this technology is only used on Twitter, but if it is efficient for advertisers, for sure they will want to use it on other platforms.

Then I watched a video about “how humans are turning the world into plastic”. Polymers exist in the nature: in the hair, silk, in the walls of cells, in the insects carapaces, in the DNA.. Plastic can take almost every forms we want, is resistant, easy and fast to create, and cheap. It is now everywhere, in every objects we have. But it is also use for single use products, such as plastic bags, coffee cup, and packaging. Plastic can take from 500 to 1 000 years to break down, but we decided to use this wonderful materials for objects that will be thrown away just a few minutes after being bought.
40% of the plastic are used for packaging.
If we consider all the waste in the world, only 9% are recycled, 12% are burnt, and 79% are in the nature. Each year, 8 million of tons arrive in the ocean. In 2050, there will be more plastic than fish if it continues like this.
Moreover, animals eat plastic by mistakes. In 2015, 90% of birds had already eaten plastic. Plastic products are horrible for the environments, but there is also something worse: Microplastics. They are smaller than 5 mm. They can come from cosmetics or toothpaste, but most of them come from floating waste. Their size make them easier to eat by animals. After that, they travel up the food chain, to arrive in our food. We found microplastics in honey, sea salt, beer, tap water, but also in the dust around us.
The solution seems easy? Why not just ban plastic?
Plastic replace many other materials, which have a bigger impact on the planet. For example, to make a single use plastic bag, you use just a few energy. To replace plastic bags, some people use cotton bags, which are reusable. But scientists have calculated that because of the big amount of energy you need to produce your cotton bag, you must use it 7 100 times before its environment impact becomes better than a plastic bag. This is just an example with one material, but if we think about all materials, all of them have advantages and disadvantages.
Moreover, for now, plastic packaging are the best way to avoid food waste, because for most of the products, there is no other solution to keep products fresh until you eat them.
Plastic goes in the ocean by the rivers. Most of the time, from the rivers in Asia and Africa, where many new industries take place. They are big industries, they cost not too much, so they produce a lot, and create pollution a lot.
The solution to reduce the amount of plastic in nature (and in ocean in particular) is to consider it as a global perspective.
Our personal actions still matters and if all together we reduce our consumption of useless single use plastic, it would have a positive impact on the environment.

The last video I watched is about the death of bees (yes, sad subject too).
Why honeybees are essentials to our lives?
One out of three of our meals is made possible thanks to honeybees. If the honeybees totally disappears, thousands of plants would die, and so humans and animals too.
In the US, the number of bees declines from 5 million in 1988, to 2.5 million today.
There are many reasons why bees are disappearing. One of them is the parasites. Small insects just like louses or fleas live on the bees. If a bee go inside the beehive and put infected egg inside, the parasites will grow with the baby bee, and when it will go out of the alveolus, it will free the parasites. After a few month, this can lead to a collapse of the entire beehive. The adult parasites can also absorb the fluids of bees and make them die. They also transmit diseases to bees that make them weaker.
This natural phenomenon is normal and should not explain the huge decline of the numbers of bees.
The second reason seems more real: the amount of insecticide used in fields. The bees can be in contact with it while collecting pollen, or because of infected water. Then, they bring it to the beehive, and it could kill the entire colony. Even small quantity of insecticide can be fatal. The bees lose their sense of direction, get lost, and then die.
Because replacing this kind of insecticides would cost a lot, scientists try to find other causes to the bees decline. They say it can be because of genetics, when the bees live all together for generation and generation, or because of poor nutrition, or stress… As if finding another cause to solve would make the bees infected by insecticides die less.

Hello Justine !
It is totally true that "Our personal actions still matters and if all together we reduce our consumption of useless single use plastic, it would have a positive impact on the environment."
So, in europe we have a lot of improvement to do with the single use plastic.
Fortunatelly, the law will help to do this changement with the ban of cutlery and plates, cotton buds, straws, drink-stirrers and balloon sticks. Also, the European Commission proposed calls for a reduction in single-use plastic for food and drink containers like plastic cups.
And the project "Bois vert" (created by Laure and me) for the CNE (national packaging competition) will help to recycle better the cups with a a vat and a cup made entirely of cardboard.

oh noo poor bees, Mosanto have to stop their production of weed killer ! they make death every where..It is proved by a lot of University that glyphosate is really bad (https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/25/weed-killer-ingredient-linked-honey-bee-deaths-glyphosate-study/1419248002/)
Mosanto must deal with the  Macron’s goal of ending glyphosate use by Jan 1, 2021, is a political objective. And the Agriculture Minister Didier Guillaume said "we’ll manage 80 percent”.