Are you taking care of your environment?

Recently I passed by a man who discarded his empty food container on the road.  It pained me to think that the man passed several garbage cans but thought that the road was simply the easiest place to dump his garbage.

I happens all the time as persons feel it’s someone else’s problem while we drown in garbage. The lack of thought that goes into this kind of behaviour is staggering, after all isn’t the same person who dumps the garbage also affected by it?

Garbage – what can you do about it?

This past Labour Day, I saw a lot of persons doing some form of cleaning up activity.  While that was good, wouldn’t it be much easier if we kept our surroundings clean in the first place?

Maintenance is a lot cheaper and takes less effort than having to haul away massive loads of rubbish. So what can consumers do to ensure that they work along with their environment and create less waste?

Well one thing that we can do is to reduce the amount of plastic products we use.  So when you go shopping, why not take boxes?

You can politely ask the cashier to pack your grocery in them and then take them home that way. If the boxes seem too hard to handle you can take your own bags. This helps to cut down on the need for plastic bags which are not biodegradable.

What about your use of plastic bottles?

Persons buy bottled water and soft drinks in large quantities without even remembering that they are bad for the environment.  If you have to buy a plastic bottle remember it’s much better to buy one bottle and keep refilling it than to keep buying several bottles.

Everything we throw out made of plastic will be here at least 500 years from now so recycling is the only option. The recycling of plastic is an extremely expensive as all plastics need to be sorted before they can be processed. Many plastic items are made with different kinds of plastic and would need to be taken apart to be recycled.

So why not just throw out less plastic?

Make a Compost Garden

Another way for consumers to be environmentally aware is by being conscious that some of what they are throwing away can be reused but in a different way.

For example a number of things such as vegetable peelings and other kitchen scraps, fresh leaves, coffee grounds and dried leaves, shredded paper and untreated sawdust can be used to create a compost. This compost can be used to create a great environment for a garden to flourish!

So are you an environmentally aware consumer?

Let me hear from you!

Teri Ann Renee Paisley

Gleaner online writer

Tags: environment, plastic, recycle