Plastics Crisis – Show-me Less Plastic in Rolla

/

The Show-me Less Plastic project held a workshop in Rolla. That’s close enough to where I live for me to be there and talk about how we formed a Beyond Plastics local group in Springfield.

The workshop was held on a Saturday in a conference room off the entry of the Phelps County Courthouse; it worked well on a Saturday since the building was otherwise closed.

The workshop proceeded with a Plastics Overview – similar info as I remember from last August with updated graphics; I took a few pictures from my seat toward the back of the room.

Lunch was plastic free! Rolla has a caterer that does a great job…has stainless steel serving pieces (and great food too)! The lunch for the recent event in Springfield was not plastic free although the team reduced the plastic by providing stainless cutlery and plates.

After lunch we talked about forming a group to work on plastic reduction activities….and I contributed my 10 minutes about our adventure forming Beyond Plastics Ozarks. The rest of the agenda included activities about youth programming, examples of engagement and outreach (tabling, presentations, screenings) …then breakout sessions on getting started, a simulation exercise and then a discussion about next steps.

The audience was interested in the topic and included a councilmember…I am optimistic that there will be a Rolla group taking actions within their community to reduce plastics.

Zooming – June 2025

/

The images I selected for this month’s Zooming post reflect the places I have been recently: the Butterfly House as the Springfield Botanical Gardens, my neighborhood and my home, the Ed Clark Museum of Missouri Geology in Rolla, the Dickerson Park Zoo, the Schuette Prairie, and the River Bend Nature Center in Wichita Falls TX. That’s quite a lot of variety during a single month! Enjoy the June 2025 slideshow!

Ed Clark Museum of Missouri Geology

/

My daughter and it did a day trip to Rolla MO to see the Ed Clark Museum of Missouri Geology last week. The forecast was for rain but it paused just as I got to my daughter’s so I took some pictures of the buds on the yuccas near her driveway.

There was another pause when we got to Rolla and stopped for lunch. It was beginning to sprinkle as we walked into the Missouri Department of Natural Resources that houses the museum. We discovered that they keep the front door locked – the receptionist must come out to let people in. We were the only visitors! The museum is not large, but the contents is almost all from Missouri and the labels are good. As usual – I took pictures.

Some of my favorites were things that I recognized: blue chert, galena, crinoid fossils, imprints of ferns, trilobites. stomatolightes

There was a glacial erratic from a banded iron formation found near Moberly, Missouri…hadn’t expected to see something like that.

I thought there would be a store associated with the museum…didn’t see any indication that it existed. They did have copies of the most recent Missouri Resources publication. It appears that the previous issues are available online, but the most recent one is part of a new blog feature (Missouri Resources Online) that they are working on; it wasn’t visible yet. I had been thinking of buying some Missouri geology maps to hang on my basement wall and I’m not sure where they can be purchased since the store was not there. Maybe printed maps are too much a ‘thing of the past.’

It rained for almost the whole drive home (almost 2 hours). We didn’t have any accidents on our side although we did see a lot of emergency vehicles on a side road we could see from Interstate. My daughter looked since I was driving. Evidently there was water covering a lot of the side road (and she said it looked deep). A little further along there was an accident on the opposite side of the Interstate that closed one of the two lanes on that side. I was glad when we made it back to Springfield.