SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA– I know being eco-friendly is not a priority especially in the Philippines where most people’s main concern is money, or where to get the next meal. When your stomach regularly grumbles, the environment is the last thing on your mind.
But still we do our part. Because if we don’t, then our kids won’t have a liveable planet to live on.
There are school programs here that focus on the environment. They teach kids the practical things they could do to help. The kids bring these messages back to their homes and hopefully, teach their parents about them, too. Why? Because most of the time, it’s the parents that actually forget to do the right thing.
And kids snitch. Oh, they do love to talk about the bad things that their parents do. It helps not to undermine the efforts of the school to implant good messages in children’s heads. So in our home, we try to do little things that we can sustain. We didn’t grow up thinking about the environment. But the next generation has to.
litter — It comes back to the most basic of things. If you have rubbish, don’t just throw it anywhere. Simple, right? Sure, but so many people conveniently forget it. This is a universal problem but it is more apparent in some places than others.
Recycle — I’m not sure if this happens in the Philippines today but when I was growing up, there was no such thing as recycling. They were merely buzzwords used around schools and poster-making competitions but not really implemented in real life. In Australia, there is a separate bin for waste, recyclable materials and green waste (such as grass, tree branches and so on).
Conserve water — I have always been aware about the scarcity of water. I remember my days as a kid hauling buckets to the local water pump because the water district failed to do its part again. But in Australia, people easily forget how precious water is. It comes out of the tap. It always does. They never think that one day nothing would come out. I remind my daughter all the time. Water is precious.
Eat leftovers — Australians throw out $8 billion worth of edible food each year. Shocked? So am I. Imagine the wasted money, the wasted food and the carbon emissions that rotting food causes. In order to lessen food waste as much as possible, we eat leftover dinners for lunch. Every week, I have one night when dinner is whatever leftovers are left in the fridge (saves me cooking time, too).
Hang the laundry — This is a first world problem. People rely on dryers all the time. I am grateful for my childhood, learning about hanging the washing up on the line instead of using the dryer (because we couldn’t afford a dryer). The simple act of hanging the washing on the line saves a lot of energy.
Use reusable grocery bags — We’ve kicked out plastic bags during groceries. We have a stash of reusable bags that we leave in the car. I have a folded one in my bag in case I need to buy something quickly. There are 160,000 plastic bags used globally every second. Imagine that. You can start with one reusable bag and go from there.
Start small. Those little measures will go a long way to help the future of this planet.
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Author’s email: kmlevis@gmail.com
