Iām increasingly getting the feeling that all the things that Iām doing to āsave the worldā are a bit of a lie and one in which weāre all complicit.
We (aspire to) buying electric cars to reduce pollution and yet heavy industry belches out pollution (some to make those electric cars) that totally mitigates our joint efforts.
There was a big hoo-ha recently about how we will, in the future be able to take guilt-free holidays thanks to old cooking oil being converted into aviation fuel. Nothing was made of the fact that the fuel will still be adding to the green house gases by being combusted so we can run around on a beach or attend a business meeting in some far flung place.
In the U.K. we have no choice but to recycle paper and its products. Fair enough. Yet in, say, Japan, if you buy something from a department store or a pack of nice tea, it will be wrapped in plastic film, then brown paper, then decorative paper and placed in a plastic bag with a plastic ribbon on it probably negatively offsetting my efforts to ārecycleā. I have to collect my plastic film waste and take it to a specialist recycling depot. Why are things still delivered in plastic film? In South East Asia, little plastic packets of single cup coffee with creamer and sugar included are so popular that it makes up one of the major oceanic plastic litter.
The water from washing our synthetic material clothes, floods the oceans with tiny plastic fibres which enter your food chain causing goodness-what-maladies, but because weāve used a Ecover or similar green detergents, we donāt have to worry about it.
I had a drink recently in which was plonked a little decorative umbrella. It was made of wood, brightly coloured paper. It struck me that this object, that will be binned by the bar staff, was manufactured in the East, required the felling of trees for the materials to make it, was packed in film plastic then into a huge shipping container, loaded onto a ship with all the other containers filled with plastic ācrapā and shipped to the West, using fuel (dirty diesel usually) so it can be essentially be immediately ignored and removed from my drink due to the risk of eye injury!
And yet we all turn a blind eye to all this because āweāre doing our bitā. We go along with corporate āGreen washingā as we think they absolve us of our manifold ecological sins. āAll our collective little efforts add up to a big impact upon the environmentā I hear you cry, and yet the world is getting hotter, our weather patterns are wilder and more extreme and the (U.K.) government is granting permits to oil companies to allow them to search for new oil field in the North Sea. In order to undo the harm weāve enjoyed inflicting upon the ecosystem with our lifestyles, weād have to essentially be living as they did in medieval times, and have only one (surviving) child per family! I donāt really to live like that so I ignore the proboscidea in the room and I dutifully put out my little cardboard/paper-filled crate out for collectionā¦each Mondayā¦
Happy New Year! š
We (aspire to) buying electric cars to reduce pollution and yet heavy industry belches out pollution (some to make those electric cars) that totally mitigates our joint efforts.
There was a big hoo-ha recently about how we will, in the future be able to take guilt-free holidays thanks to old cooking oil being converted into aviation fuel. Nothing was made of the fact that the fuel will still be adding to the green house gases by being combusted so we can run around on a beach or attend a business meeting in some far flung place.
In the U.K. we have no choice but to recycle paper and its products. Fair enough. Yet in, say, Japan, if you buy something from a department store or a pack of nice tea, it will be wrapped in plastic film, then brown paper, then decorative paper and placed in a plastic bag with a plastic ribbon on it probably negatively offsetting my efforts to ārecycleā. I have to collect my plastic film waste and take it to a specialist recycling depot. Why are things still delivered in plastic film? In South East Asia, little plastic packets of single cup coffee with creamer and sugar included are so popular that it makes up one of the major oceanic plastic litter.
The water from washing our synthetic material clothes, floods the oceans with tiny plastic fibres which enter your food chain causing goodness-what-maladies, but because weāve used a Ecover or similar green detergents, we donāt have to worry about it.
I had a drink recently in which was plonked a little decorative umbrella. It was made of wood, brightly coloured paper. It struck me that this object, that will be binned by the bar staff, was manufactured in the East, required the felling of trees for the materials to make it, was packed in film plastic then into a huge shipping container, loaded onto a ship with all the other containers filled with plastic ācrapā and shipped to the West, using fuel (dirty diesel usually) so it can be essentially be immediately ignored and removed from my drink due to the risk of eye injury!
And yet we all turn a blind eye to all this because āweāre doing our bitā. We go along with corporate āGreen washingā as we think they absolve us of our manifold ecological sins. āAll our collective little efforts add up to a big impact upon the environmentā I hear you cry, and yet the world is getting hotter, our weather patterns are wilder and more extreme and the (U.K.) government is granting permits to oil companies to allow them to search for new oil field in the North Sea. In order to undo the harm weāve enjoyed inflicting upon the ecosystem with our lifestyles, weād have to essentially be living as they did in medieval times, and have only one (surviving) child per family! I donāt really to live like that so I ignore the proboscidea in the room and I dutifully put out my little cardboard/paper-filled crate out for collectionā¦each Mondayā¦
Happy New Year! š
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