"A realization in cleaning"
Ok so, today I suddenly had the urge of cleaning my room which is literally a sort of landfill and storm wrecked site to see. As I was cleaning my drawer and desk, I made a point to place in a separate plastic bag the documents that I had before which were only used on the one side, thinking that the other side can still be used for scratch paper in the future. After finishing the whole desk and drawer part of the room, I noticed that deyyym, we humans definitely use a lot of PAPER. I realized this when I remembered that the room downstairs, which is my locker room(I place my books/school stuff there for easy access when going to school the next day), contains a lot of handouts/ photocopies of various readings and answer keys from many subjects. I could just imaging how much paper is used every single day, by each person, all across the globe. ITS PROBABLY AROUND TRILLIONS! To think that a certain resource that we are now currently having a problem due to shortage, the trees, is also the one resource that we use for our daily need, that is PAPER.
Sure, the effort of saving the world by planting trees is definitely a great idea, and I personally commend the people who still promote that advocacy, but what else can we do to stop this on going chaotic madness of creating more and more waste in society? Have you guys passed by Marikina River lately? Along Marcos bridge and SM Marikina, seriously, it's not a Landfill. The area you see near the LRT Line is all full of dump and garbage. Since I commute everyday, I cannot just ignore the uncanny smell that lingers constantly around that area, which made me think why would they do such a thing and pile all the garbage there? Enough of blaming the inefficient and corrupt government, that aside. Look at what our constant search for low cost products and efficient use of resources brought us. The use of plastic materials may bring companies lower cost, but what happens when that plastic bag is used from the supermarket? Did they ever consider that?
We at home, we use the plastic bags we got from grocery shopping, and use it as trash bags after, like what most households do. So what happens after the garbage gets collected by the garbage man? It gets sent to the dumpsters and landfills around the metro which i guess were pre sorted, but were simply dumped after.
(at this point medyo nawala ako bigla sa trail of thought due to something that happened all of a sudden, so I'm just recalling stuff I want to write as i go on)
So basically the point is that, plastic bags are used in damn many establishments across the globe as means of carrying stuff the easy way. WHY NOT GO BACK TO PAPER BAGS? it has already been done before, why not do it again? OR why not use paper stuff again of that matter?
WASTING TREES YOU MAY ASK? WE GOT A LOT OF PAPER WASTE TO GO BY, WHY NOT RECYCLE?
This occurred to me that I wanted to make my own paper out of the waste paper i gathered at home, all it takes is to just shred them into peaces and then submerge them into a solution which binds the starch, use silk screen to allow water to drain, then let it dry. How simple is that.
I mean seriously, how long does paper degrade and turn into dust? It's biodegradable, but certainly it can last for many years before it degrades right? look at the old documents that we have till now, they last for like more than a hundred years then are just so fragile. But that is damn long before they do. When you look at plastic bags, they never get degraded, well they do, but in MILLIONS OF YEARS. So it just stays there as waste. Forever, clogging the drainage systems, hurting the sea animals currently swimming around the ocean filled with garbage.
Sure plastic bags can be recycled and made into new plastic bags, but that is clearly not being done, well, not enough i guess. We continue to produce more and more plastic bags and more complex forms of packaging that the simple and earth friendly tactics are now being considered as costly options and are now neglected in search of new ways of advertising and cost efficiency.
This is certainly a campaign that cannot be done in a wide scale at an immediate time. So why not start at the school? I commend the people who conduct paper drives and the new Waste management Garbage disposal bins as proposed by the AEMC, which now has a dry paper bin on it. Why not make Ateneo Recycled paper or paper bags. for the LS bookstore or even the cafeteria? The paper bag you get when purchasing a Chris Tiu jersey for example, may contain fragments of an accounting exam paper that was last seen some 20 years ago.
So why not go at it? It may seem irrational or somehow a difficult task in terms of logistics and coordination, but hey, It's just a proposal.
So I say this to all people concerned for the environment, This is what I think is one solution to combat the growing waste problem that we have in the country that has not only affected the health of our people, but has also brought in many casualties due to the floods we have experienced these past few months.
honestly, one of the reasons why i write this apart from my concern for the environment is that, I don't want to wake up one day and when i look at the window I see a landfill and a community filled with garbage with a nasty stench that you need to turn up the air conditioner every single day just to avoid it. Also, I don;t wish to make the case of flooding even worse than it already is in our country, many lives have already been taken, and many families are now suffering.
These little steps that we take as individuals could definitely be the start of a big change in society.
written by:
Ferdinand James D. Lajom
October 23, 2009
To those who have read this article/essay, I sure would appreciate your comments, suggestions, violent reactions, chismis, etc.
Thank you for taking the time to read this :)
