making environment-friendly choices part of one's routine
i watched a programme a few weeks back about our grocery shopping and how environmentally friendly it is - they took 2 families and got them to swap the way they shopped for their weekly groceries. one family shopped at their nearest Sainsbury's - they drove there even though it was only a 10 min walk away - while the other family stocked up at their local shops (butchers, farmer's markets...). the programme talked a lot about food miles and how one should make the conscious effort not to buy food that is imported but to support local farmers. also, processed food (salad bowls, frozen ready-meals...) produces excess waste because of the extra packaging and how people should reuse their plastic bags rather than take new ones at the till.
i have been making an effort to be more environmentally-conscious by always taking my backpack when i go shopping and putting my purchases straight in rather than using extra plastic bags to bag them. this in addition to plenty of recycling of paper, plastic bags and glass bottles (strangely enough, they dont seem to do much plastic recycling here, unlike at home), which i have to thank my mom for making it so much of a habit for me as we've been recycling since i was in primary school.
but for me, the biggest thing i dont see as always feasible is this food miles thing. fair enough it is probably reasonably ok to do it here (though foreigners might argue against it especially when we are buying imported items like Indomie and ABC kecap manis) but how does it work in Singapore? we don't really have a domestic agricultural and livestock industry that can sustain the country - think about all those adverts of Brazilian beef and Air-Pork from Australia. and what about all the things we eat regularly without even seeing as "exotic" and "out-of-season" like strawberries, salmon sashimi, crab roe...
and if the UK is having problems with waste disposal, how come Singapore doesnt seem to have this problem despite having such small landspace and such high density of people per square mile? or are we contributing significantly to the destruction of the ozone layer because we burn our waste (in addition to the CO2 emissions from our millions of food miles)?
i have been making an effort to be more environmentally-conscious by always taking my backpack when i go shopping and putting my purchases straight in rather than using extra plastic bags to bag them. this in addition to plenty of recycling of paper, plastic bags and glass bottles (strangely enough, they dont seem to do much plastic recycling here, unlike at home), which i have to thank my mom for making it so much of a habit for me as we've been recycling since i was in primary school.
but for me, the biggest thing i dont see as always feasible is this food miles thing. fair enough it is probably reasonably ok to do it here (though foreigners might argue against it especially when we are buying imported items like Indomie and ABC kecap manis) but how does it work in Singapore? we don't really have a domestic agricultural and livestock industry that can sustain the country - think about all those adverts of Brazilian beef and Air-Pork from Australia. and what about all the things we eat regularly without even seeing as "exotic" and "out-of-season" like strawberries, salmon sashimi, crab roe...
and if the UK is having problems with waste disposal, how come Singapore doesnt seem to have this problem despite having such small landspace and such high density of people per square mile? or are we contributing significantly to the destruction of the ozone layer because we burn our waste (in addition to the CO2 emissions from our millions of food miles)?
posted by ade at
9:11 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home