Green Your Routine

CEBU, Philippines – With the environment easily becoming a buzzword following the mass screening of Al Gore’s award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which thawed the world’s frigid attitude towards Mother Nature, green is definitely in. 

Environmentalists, NGOs, advocacy groups, the government, and even many of the world’s biggest corporations have actually been doubling their efforts and are spending mucho dinero in trying to make like Captain Planet to save the world from the irreversible effects of the hastening climate change that all of us the world over are experiencing, thanks to our highly consumerist and extremely wasteful lifestyles.

Although many of us may not necessarily have bank accounts the size of the gaping ozone holes above Antarctica, all of us can pitch in a little bit of our time and effort just to make sure that where we live right now won’t be 10,000 leagues under the sea by say, 2030.

Here’s how hip and happening kids like us can green our routine:

Tree mo ‘to. The United Nations Environment Program’s Billion Tree Campaign is bent on reforesting many of our planet’s denuded woods. The goal is to plant seven billion trees which roughly makes it one tree for every person in the planet. Three billion have already been planted while five billion have been pledged. Give this a local and a more realistic twist by gathering the entire barkada to devote a weekend for every month this year all for the love of Mother Earth. Check out your nearest Provincial Environmental and Natural Resources Office (PENRO) to get you started on your reforestation gimmick stat. Not only will this give you and your berks a chance at an exciting road trip for a last summer hurrah, but it’ll also be one great bonding experience with nature. For a more tropical twist, you can opt to go to the more coastal areas and get down in the mud at the break of dawn for some serious mangrove reforestation.

Pass it on. The cliché, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, isn’t a cliché for nothing. If you’ve got stuff you don’t need and you don’t want, don’t just chuck them into the city dump. Other people could really use that pair of sneaks from lolo that you’ve already outgrown. Start de-cluttering your room by sorting out your stuff and putting all the junk in one box. If you don’t want to go solo, ask your friends to join in on the de-cluttering by letting them to the same. You can donate your stuff to homes for the needy or to charitable organizations or you can opt to make money by holding a garage sale, a rummage sale, or by selling off your stuff in the net. 

Cut back—on the waste and on the expenses. A lot of us don’t exactly have a huge inheritance which we can squander off, so it pays for us to conserve our very limited resources and save the earth while doing so. Instead of using disposable razors, invest on an electric razor or one with replaceable blades for you to keep it’s life and your budget longer while at the same time minimizing the waste. Skip the tissue paper for drying your face and your hands and instead go for towels which you can easily reuse the next time. After all, you’re already clean to begin with when you use them. Can’t live without flipping through a mag or a daily? Face it, you’re not really gonna read all the stories—and I mean all. Check out common places like libraries which might subscribe to your paper or mag of choice and save money but still enjoy the read. You can also borrow the latest issue from a friend if it’s not in the lib.

It’s all in the bag. Canvass bags, green bags, whatever you want to call them, have made a statement among today’s trendsetters. Tote a canvass bag that’s huge enough to carry everything so the next time you go shopping, you can actually opt to skip the plastic and just put everything that fits into the bag. If you’re bringing home so many carrier bags from shoe stores and boutiques, stack them in your room. They always come in handy the moment you actually least expect to use them.

Save trees, save paper. Okay, don’t start making this an excuse to miss important exams just because these exams mean more paper which translates to more trees being cut. If you need to print out drafts of your term papers which you need to manually edit, print it on the clean side of pieces of scratch paper which are beginning to pile up in your room. If you’ve got more scratch than you can handle, cut it all up and convert it into a make-shift notepad. If you just can’t write on it and if you’re also the artsy type, turn whose into papier mache. Stack all your used bond papers together with all of last year’s broadsheets and sell them to paper collectors for a good price.

Going green might seem like a tall order for most of us who’ve already gotten used to the use-and-throw habit, but just like popping into a new job, we’ll definitely get the hang of it. Saving the earth isn’t just some overused PR campaign some random company whipped up. It’s a responsibility that all of us, from the average man on the street to the world’s most powerful government, have to share. After all, it’s not like we can just move to Jupiter when the earth goes ballistic, right?