recently we celebrated the earth day (for those who forget, let me remind you.. it was last tuesday laaa). one question that continues popping into my mind is what have i done to help reducing the amount of wastes everyday.. we malaysian is still low in recycling our wastes. as a lecturer, i do try to incorporate recycling in my research (currently researching the impact of using rice husk ash as additives in soil stabilization). but as a mother, i still struggle to do my part. going to market and shopping with family are still one of the activities that mothers do. do you realize that we still use plastic bags in our daily shopping? no matter if it's a small shops near our houses or the mega- super- big markets such as carrefour, tesco, giant etc still uses plastic bags. most of the western's country have changed their plastic bags to paper bags. they encouraged buyers to bring their own bags to put all shopping items. it is sad to say that we don't adapt this environment to our daily life. i was even surprise during few visits to local mall like billion when i said to the counter girl that i want to reduce the amount of plastic bags used to pack my shopping items, she straight away reply that it is their job to put each different types of thing into different plastic bags. i ended up carrying more than 5 plastic bags when i can actually mixed the items into 3 bags only! huh! watching the documentary of al-gore 'the inconvenient truth' opens my mind and eventhough we are definitely late in receiving this kind of information in malaysia, we still can catch up.
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these past few months, i've started organizing my household's waste. i've tried seperating plastic bottles and cans and also tried to recycle it. i sent these wastes to the office cleaners and they sold it to collectors. i told them to keep the money to themselves (it's not much actually but still can buy them drinks etc). currently, my husbands help to keep things up. eventhough there are times when we just give the recycleable things to the garbage collector, but we still seperate those items. i can see that they put these thing in different place than the domestic wastes (means that they do sell these things to collectors).
in the office, we already tried to incorporate the usage of recycled papers. memos are printed on recycled papers and drafts too.. dean said that we saved a lot when not buying papers anymore. it's good actually to see this kind of attitude in the office. unless it's an official letter, we print everything on a recycled paper. other than that, we do try to reduce the amount of electricity and water usage. in usm we called this 'greening the office'. it seems to get good cooperation among colleagues. alhamdulillah. and the most popular in usm currently is the 'white coffin'. USM's cafeteria has banded the usage of polystyrofoam.. they encouraged us to use new packaging (need to add 20cents more because these thing need to be recycled..) or we can help reducing the amount of wastes by eating at the cafeteria.. these are few of the effort done by usm to help reducing the damage to our environment. you can see the usm initiatives on helping to protect environment by checking into our website and go to 'campus sejahtera' or healthy campus link - see my labels on the right column.
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as a mother, i would like to start this effort to save the earth and helping others especially those in need... i would like to start a community of people who would like to recycle all their babies things such as clothes, bottles, baby cots, strollers, prams etc. these valuables will be given to those in need, especially to those in remote area. i will try to find a good family/ orphanage where these thing will benefit them a lot. i welcome any comments and hopefully god help me to help other people in need. i would like to start this community because i do have several things that can be given to places in need (like nursery or orphanage) and i would like to have my family and friends to do so. i love kids. i want my son to live comfortable with good things and i believe that other babies/ child should feel the same way too.. maybe this will be a way of helping others to have a comfortable life too.. i will explain to you later the cause of this commitment in my next posting.
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