A Recycled Life
Recently I bought my son a DVD on Garbage and Recycling.
Its a beautiful educational video that teaches children all about recycling.
Though the video is predominantly American in its ways, I still wanted my son to see it.
I felt really enlightened after watching it myself.
However advanced we may be as a country in adopting the American Culture from Hollywood movies and soaps; we have a long way to go before we could do the same in terms of Garbage and Recycling.
Its rather strange that even the most educated people in this country have absolutely no civic sense.
It is no surprise that the children are taking to their parents.
One evening, while taking my son for a walk we noticed a family walking on the pavement with us.
The couple had a son who was probably 7 or 8 years old.
He had an empty plastic bottle in his hand, with which he was playing around like a ball.
The little Tendulkar then flung the bottle in the air for a six.
And as usual the parents ignored the act and the entire family headed home.
My husband, picked up that empty bottle and called out to the little boy and his family.
He asked the boy to throw the bottle in the bin just a few feet away.
The parents were ashamed and did nothing but grinned.
Same goes with the way our garbage.
It is not sorted by us but by poor rag pickers who make a living out of selling stuff that can be recycled.
I had briefly visited the British Sky Broadcasting Contact Center in Dunfermline, Scotland a few years ago.
Their office cafeteria was rather impressive.
They had 6 or 7 odd bins to collect different kinds of garbage.
One for cans, then another for cardboard boxes and tetra packs, one for Styrofoam glasses, one for wet waste (food), one for dry waste (food), one for pet bottles etc etc.
Another very distinct memory I have of my trip to Scotland is how clean the air felt.
I remember landing in Mumbai and getting a whiff of guttery smell while still in the aircraft.
All this because recycling is still not a part of our daily lives.
We do everything on our roads.
We litter, we pee and we bathe on our roads.
We feel ripped off when we have to pay a rupee or two more at a supermarket for recyclable plastic bags, we find it so hard to walk to the dustbin that we throw whatever is in our hand on the street and fling stuff out of our car windows.
We don't have separate bins for anything and sometimes we don't even have a bin at all, we just collect our garbage in non-biodegradable plastic bags.
If we go to the beach, we throw things in the water.
Most of our industrial waste also goes just there.
Most of our creeks are now gutters used for waste disposal.
And this is exactly what we teach our kids.
So if anything has to change, it has to be our attitude and how the government manages and collects waste.
We may have recycling plants all over the country and we may have large dustbins to collect waste at every corner on the street, however we are doing no service to the environment unless each and every citizen makes an effort to manage the waste in their homes first.
Its a beautiful educational video that teaches children all about recycling.
Though the video is predominantly American in its ways, I still wanted my son to see it.
I felt really enlightened after watching it myself.
However advanced we may be as a country in adopting the American Culture from Hollywood movies and soaps; we have a long way to go before we could do the same in terms of Garbage and Recycling.
Its rather strange that even the most educated people in this country have absolutely no civic sense.
It is no surprise that the children are taking to their parents.
One evening, while taking my son for a walk we noticed a family walking on the pavement with us.
The couple had a son who was probably 7 or 8 years old.
He had an empty plastic bottle in his hand, with which he was playing around like a ball.
The little Tendulkar then flung the bottle in the air for a six.
And as usual the parents ignored the act and the entire family headed home.
My husband, picked up that empty bottle and called out to the little boy and his family.
He asked the boy to throw the bottle in the bin just a few feet away.
The parents were ashamed and did nothing but grinned.
Same goes with the way our garbage.
It is not sorted by us but by poor rag pickers who make a living out of selling stuff that can be recycled.
I had briefly visited the British Sky Broadcasting Contact Center in Dunfermline, Scotland a few years ago.
Their office cafeteria was rather impressive.
They had 6 or 7 odd bins to collect different kinds of garbage.
One for cans, then another for cardboard boxes and tetra packs, one for Styrofoam glasses, one for wet waste (food), one for dry waste (food), one for pet bottles etc etc.
Another very distinct memory I have of my trip to Scotland is how clean the air felt.
I remember landing in Mumbai and getting a whiff of guttery smell while still in the aircraft.
All this because recycling is still not a part of our daily lives.
We do everything on our roads.
We litter, we pee and we bathe on our roads.
We feel ripped off when we have to pay a rupee or two more at a supermarket for recyclable plastic bags, we find it so hard to walk to the dustbin that we throw whatever is in our hand on the street and fling stuff out of our car windows.
We don't have separate bins for anything and sometimes we don't even have a bin at all, we just collect our garbage in non-biodegradable plastic bags.
If we go to the beach, we throw things in the water.
Most of our industrial waste also goes just there.
Most of our creeks are now gutters used for waste disposal.
And this is exactly what we teach our kids.
So if anything has to change, it has to be our attitude and how the government manages and collects waste.
We may have recycling plants all over the country and we may have large dustbins to collect waste at every corner on the street, however we are doing no service to the environment unless each and every citizen makes an effort to manage the waste in their homes first.
Source...