Memento - A Picture Tells A Thousand Words

My Life and Garbage

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What's a little walk to the garbage bin, when you can shop for hours? (found this trash as we were about to devour our own dinner last night - disgusting)

How many plastic bags are in there? How many cigarette butts are still lying on the pavement? These 2 are the two hardest to disintegrate. A small butt takes 10 yrs. Believe it or not.

Earth Day is Everyday
Toronto, Canada

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children"

Today is Earth Day. Yesterday was Earth day too, tomorrow is earth saturday. Is it just right to celebrate it everyday?

Today at 2 PM, everyone from the Mayor to everyone in Toronto will be out of their offices and schools to clean up and make our beautiful earth more beautiful and a lot cleaner than it ever was.

I just wish it was not just at 2 PM today, but a conscious effort of doing it consistently. Besides, the only thing common to all mankind is the ground below us - our Mother Earth.

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I was raised in a country that was poor but lived in excess. We never had programs that wanted to alleviate waste management problems. Ironically there were - including the giant Coastal Road incinerator that was to be of help compact garbage, disintegrate and burn (and add to air pollution?) from Paranaque to its eventual landfill in Cavite. What was ironic? It got burned down. Hah!

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Recent Conscious Efforts to Help Save Mother Earth

1. We now use cold water for laundry. How dirty or soiled are our clothes that we need to have a 90-degree water, causing us to use more energy? Use cold water detergent too, as it quickly disintegrates dirt (I sound like Tide, but it really works!) in what could be the bulk of water usage in a regular home. We have saved $25 monthly in water and electricity combined. Not much? That's more than P1,000 Philippine pesos, our Meralco bill back home already.

2. Michele has joined a carpool. That means a reduction of from 33 to 60% of gasoline and additional air pollutants. She can sleep too during the trip. That's energy added to her. :)

3. Leah reminded me before to remove cellphone chargers from sockets when not in use. I've taken it a notch higher. I bought easy to turn off surge protectors to turn off laptops (4 of them) at night and timers for lampshades. No reason for us leaving them turned on the whole night.

4. We're reusing junk mail envelops and turning them to scratch papers, laundry lists and bookmarkers. I once tried resending them back to the junk mail senders (its free to return mail to senders) so that they know I don't need junk mail and they just spent $ 0.52 uselessly. My junk mail now has been cut to less than half.

Ahhh...my biggest sin is TV. So...

5. No TV except from 8 to 10:30 at night - OR, record the favorite shows from Cable to DVDs. This is done with the TV turned off, the speakers are turned off, only the DVD recorder is turned on and we get to watch our favorite 1-hr shows in 67% of the time on Saturdays.

The promise of a better place remains to be a promise. We should do our own little share to the big picture. Teach a kid about cleaner environment. Pass on that newspaper to a seatmate in the bus and subway train. Walk, jog instead of using the car for a 1-5 kilometer errand.

Recycle. Reuse and Refuse (no no to grocery bags, please!)

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This is a personal experience.

Driving down Fort Bonifacio in Taguig, we saw the clearing out of a 10-15 year old landfill. We were pleased to see that the whole place was almost brown, the garbage disintegrated, everything that was there decomposed, EXCEPT for these red and white, and blue plastic bags. Thanks to Mercury Drug, National Bookstore and SM Shoemart, their ads on their plastic bags live on for years and destroy our mother Earth.

Say NO to plastic bags from now on....bring back brown bags!

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