Now that the kitchen wet wastes are managed well, we had the need to dispose our garbage only once in 2 or 3 days. I heaved a deep sigh of relief and was so happy at having accomplished this task. Then I suddenly got curious to find out what else goes into my garbage bin. There were lot of plastics – milk covers on a daily basis, oil covers, plastic carry bags n lot of plastic covers – I now wanted to manage these as well; and on went the google search and I found out these can be perfectly recycled (only thing I had to clean the milk/wet covers and dry them so that they can be stored till they are picked up for recycling). These are some of the vendors who can do this beautiful job of recycling for us:
So as to say, they collect newspapers (or any bit of paper for that matter), plastics covers and bottles, metal scrap.
I was doing all this only for the fancy of reducing the trash disposal frequency – but in the process of googling on this, I discovered something much bigger – the answer to “WHY ARE PLASTICS BAD?”; and here is the answer – plastics cannot decompose – they are bio-degradable – a piece of plastic once created is always there on the planet, whether it is thrown away or sent for recycling( because even if you recycle its still converted to another piece of plastic). Burning plastics pollutes the air, dumping them into landfills pollutes the soil and the groundwater and when they are washed off into the sea, it pollutes the sea water and kills the aquatic life.
So its high time we follow the rule of 3R’s “REDUCE REUSE or RECYCLE”. So simple changes that we have made in our home to reduce plastics are these:
- Carry your own shopping bags all the time – there are bags which can folded into your purse – here is a link to get those kinda bags, MyPy
- Carry your own containers to hotels buy food (parcel) – mite sound absurd but it makes a lot of difference to your health and the environment’s health – LET’S stop buying food packed in plastic bags
- Avoid buying packaged food of any form – most of these are processed foods and they are simply junk and a burden to your health.
Having done this, our garbage reduced much further and we had to dispose our trash only once in a week or so except…move on to the next post for that..!!
A couple of interesting reads on Plastic waste management:
- Namma Bhoomi community on FB
- 2bin1bag
When you start going natural, you can never stop! 