Saving Our Environment One Plastic At A Time
In Celebration of the World Environment Day 2022
I live in an industrial city. Manufacturers of food, appliances, plastic products, plastic bags, and other commodities are the backbone of the city’s economy.
While other cities can implement the “no plastic policy” for consumers, the city government can not. It’s like cutting the lifeline of the working people and businesses. In my practice, most of my patients are factory workers. It’s a chain reaction.
Despite the presence of plastic manufacturers, the number of businesses dealing with used plastic products are also a part of the city’s backbone.
Collecting used plastic bottles, plastic containers and everything made with plastic became a livelihood. They sell them to the junk shops. From the junk shops to the factories who chop them into small pieces, then grind and process to become pellets . These pellets are the raw materials to be used in manufacturing new plastic products that do not need virgin-type raw materials.
In the late 80s, my father started a business where he made strands of plastic that were tied around a bunch of tiger grass to make a broom. The materials he used were used clear plastics, particularly the PP and PE type. The clear plastics like the ones used in clothes, toys, and chemicals.
The plastics were washed, dried, grinded, pelletized, put in a machine to melt, then passed into the extruder for the finished product.
It’s a long, tedious and costly process that we adopted for quite some time.
The problem with recycling the plastics were poor segregation.
Most of the plastics were so filthy.
Some were used as bags for chemicals. Washing them contributed to water pollution and became a health hazard for those who washed them.
Some of the scrap plastics were mixed with fragments of metal.
Some extruded hazardous odor.
In the year 2000, Ecological Solid Waste Management Act was created. One of its objectives is to ensure the proper waste segregation, collection, transport, storage, treatment, and disposal of solid waste.
But 22 years later, the Philippines are still struggling with solid waste.
Why?
There are loopholes in the act. It’s about — do this and do that and if you can’t, you’ll pay for this and that as penalty. It’s not about how one can do it based on the real situation.
Everyone is a waste generator but not everyone is obliged to follow the act. Businesses, whether macro or micro are treated the same strictness and they are quite lenient to households who generated more wastes.
Implementing the act means spending huge amount that a local government unit is not capable of.
With limited available living space that a Filipino family has, different types of waste containers for different types of waste have no place to occupy.
Lack of dissemination of information and education especially among the informal settlers, who disposed their waste as if the the world owe them.
What can we do now?
For all of us who know what to do and what matters, let’s just continue the process. Never stop being mindful.
We might be outnumbered by the mindless but if we add all our determination, efforts and mindfulness, we can still make a difference.
No matter how small it is, Mother nature will embrace it as the biggest one.
We can rescue the world, no matter how many layers of plastic it has been wrapped in. For we know the difference between right and wrong.
We have Only One World.
We only live once, make that once a meaningful lasting impression.
The younger generation’s future depends on how we treat our Only One World.
