Monday, October 15, 2007
Most of us may have heard the news.Al Gore's definitely not the next U.S. president, but he did win this year's Nobel Peace Prize, along with the IPCC for their contributions in the global warming awareness field. Good for them then. Finally the issue that has been bugging every environmentally-conscious person on the planet has achieved another level of higher awareness.
Down back in Singapore however, life still seems to go on as usual. Sure, maybe a few more would have been nudged to awareness of "this environment thingy" that got Al Gore the Peace Prize. My aunt, for example, suddenly wanted to find a book about "that movie he made"(An Inconvenient Truth). Overall, I'd rate the impact somewhere between 0.0 to 0.1 on the Richter Scale, or not felt at all.
Singaporeans seemingly, are still not very aware about the global warming issue. Either that or they just simply don't care at all. The other day I passed by Mcdonalds and got myself a Fillet O Fish (mmm... yummy.... oops, off topic). Well, since it was just a little burger, I didn't feel the need to get a plastic bag and asked the service crew to skip that little transparent wrapper. Interestingly enough the lady gave me a shocked look, like not taking that plastic bag was akin to not washing my hands after going to the toilet. So much for McDonalds's environmental efforts.
That itself isn't the only dismaying part. Nowadays the supermarkets all offer reusable shopping bags. Useful they may be, they're often just placed next to the checkout counter where little attention is paid to it (except maybe for the monthly BYOB day where plastic bags are shunned for their price per bag). Occasionally someone from the queue picks up a bag while checking out their items. Poof. There goes the bag into the plastic bag of groceries. Hardly do I see cashiers making an effort to transfer the groceries in the plastic bags into the reusable bags. What's more amazing is how some people bring along a reusable storage bag only to put in the plastic bags of groceries into the reusable bag. What then is the purpose of the reusable bag? Is it simply a bigger bag to consolidate the smaller bags?
Then again, not all is bad. Recently I found out about this little yahoo group called Freecycle. Its an online reuse website where people post the stuff that they don't want up and someone else offers to take it. Pretty good start to a more reuse-friendly nation. Never mind that it is cluttered with more "Wanted" posts than "Offer" posts, at least its a good start I might reckon.
Seems NEA is releasing a energy efficiency masterplan soon also, a great time to try to kickstart things. Why is it a great time? Well, simply because its not too late to try.
Beyond the Nobel Peace Prize, how will Singapore emerge to be in the future? One more environmentally friendly? That certainly has a visible possibility, and hopefully that possibility
will become more concrete in the near future.
(Yay, finally another post to add to my dead blog. Anyone like my new skin?)
1:35 AM
Caulibeam