Going Green

March 9, 2010

“What have you done lately to be better stewards of this planet?” That was a question a good friend posed on Plurk, a microblogging site similar to the more popular Twitter. The friend of mine who posed this question is one of the few people I admire when it comes to living a good life. She genuinely cares about the environment, about the Philippines and the Filipino people, about eating healthily, and about living life to the fullest. I read the replies and felt quite glad that people are starting to take action to save our planet.

Global warming is no joke, and it is a matter not to be taken lightly. For other people who simply can’t afford to worry about the environment (because they primarily worry about where their next meal will come from or if there will even be a next meal), more fortunate people like us should do what we can to save what is left of our slowly dying planet. One step at a time is the way to do it. Little things, when you add them up, will make a big difference in the long run.

I replied to my friend’s Plurk, briefly summarizing what we in our household do to be a little kinder to Mother Nature. Incidentally, another friend of mine just wrote about global warming in his blog, which gave me an a-ha moment to further elaborate and to share to everyone how we in our home are going green.

Power conservation. It has been a long-time practice in our home to turn off lights and appliances that are not in use. I remember when I was young, our parents used to scold us if we didn’t turn off the light before leaving a room or if we didn’t turn off the electric fan before going outside to play or if we left the refrigerator door open too long. They made us feel that wasting electricity warranted capital punishment.

Now that I’m an adult, it seems as though the tables have been turned because I’m the one now nitpicking about lights left on when no one’s in the room or an electric fan left running when no one’s using it. When we go out of town or just out for the day, I make sure that every appliance in the house is unplugged except the refrigerator, that all the lights are turned off, except for the garage light if we knew we were going to be home late. We also only use the AC when the heat is unbearable and when we feel we would be having a heat stroke.

Water conservation. Everybody in our household knows how to brush one’s teeth without wasting buckets and buckets of water. It’s like second nature for us to turn the faucet off when brushing. And we do our laundry differently. We machine wash the clothes, but rinse them manually. That way, none or little water is wasted. The water from the washing machine and the water that was used to rinse the soapy clothes would be saved and used for the toilet bowl. When washing the dishes, I make sure that the faucet is turned off when I’m soaping the dishes and that the faucet is turned on just right when I’m rinsing them.

Waste reduction/recycling. We segregate our garbage here at home. Recently, my mom asked our occasional gardener to dig a hole in our yard to serve as a compost pit for our degradable wastes.

Our compost pit

My dad, on the other hand, is in charge of storing non-biodegradable wastes like glass bottles, plastic bottles, metal cans, old newspapers, cardboard boxes, other disposable plastic containers and sell them biweekly to our suking junk man who comes by to buy our junk during the weekends. Plastic bags and paper bags are constantly being reused.

A box of carton waste

A stack of old newspapers

Our little town also enacted an ordinance to reduce plastic bag usage. Plastic bags are now banned from almost every market, supermarket, grocery store and any other store. People are encouraged to bring their own shopping bags. And when you walk the streets of our town today, you will see people toting brown paper bags instead of the rainbow-colored plastic bags. My only problem with that is paper is made out of trees, right? Plastic bag usage is reduced, but in consequence, more trees will have to suffer because of the increase in the demand for paper bags. Unless they’re making it out of recycled paper, then there wouldn’t be a problem.

What I do when I’m not at home. When I’m out in the streets walking or commuting from home to my place of work and back, I make it a habit to bring home whatever garbage I have accumulated if I don’t see any garbage can around. I feel guilty about just even the thought of throwing a small piece of candy wrapper on the street. Every time I take the bus or jeepney, I feel saddened when I see the floor littered with orange peels, empty plastic mineral water bottles, plastic wrappers of junk food, etc. How angering it is that some people don’t care at all about the environment, and how heartbreaking it is that some people don’t have a clue that the very garbage that they throw out in the streets will be the same garbage that will come ravaging back to their homes with raging waters when wet season comes.

So anyway, yeah, that’s how we do it here at home. Anyone who reads this, I hope you too are doing something for Mother Nature. We all know that we have the power to change the situation we are in, and if we don’t act now, tomorrow might be too late.