Go Green !!

As a kid I used to be such a pest if anyone was to drop a chocolate wrapper on the ground instead of in the dust bin ...i would glare down at them to pick it up and if they did not I made sure I gave them the guilty eye before picking it up myself and dropping it in the dustbin . Today in the morning walking along on a trail in a state park I saw someone had dropped a big McDonalds To -go bag on the side of the road . I picked it up and walked for a mile or so before I could find a dustbin to dump it in . I have always been a conservationist at heart picking up a few litters here and there and dropping them .

This year the conservationist in me has decided to do smthing about the litter we generate . Initially when I had come to the US I remember stopping into a friend's office and asking him to explain smthing , he took out a A4 size paper , wrote something on it and then threw it away . I instantly remembered the struggle we had to go thru to get A4 papers in during my undergrad . Understandably the latter situation was not due to some green ethics but basically due to lack of availability . Still it points to a important message , back in india we were not wasteful in our ways and would use/reuse things .

As more plenty has entered our lives so has wasteful spending . No wonder US is the biggest consumer on earth . I hardly find anything being recycled in this country . Tailors , cobblers , bartan waali all those classes of people are totally absent here . The idea is to just throw away smthing once you are done using it , or even if you dnt like it . Food , clothes , shoes , furniture , cars , this idea applies to all of it . And ya how I can forget my favorite topic plastic "Plastic water bottles" , seriously why does anyone on earth want to buy water . I still remember the days when we used to carry a bottle filled with water to school , well not here ... thirsty - grab a water bottle . A statistic I once read said the amount of water bottles american consume in a year can be used to make a road from the earth to the moon !!!! And ya adding to it the To Go culture ....a paper bag , 100s of napkins , plastic spoons , forks , big plastic pop cups etc etc

My idea has been to try and cut one plastic spoon , a plastic bottle and plastic bag at a time . I keep my own spoons and cups at work so that I dnt have to take a plastic spoon , carry a shopping bag each time I go shopping and my water bottle everytime I go out . Also trying my hand at recycling as much of trash as possible at home . I would in no way say that this is enough but it is first step . I guess it mostly a gift from my mom who has been a stickler for recycling ever since we were kids .

I did pick up a few books on recycling here and there and surprise all the things mentioned in it were all the things which we have seen our mom and grand mom's do at home . Although in their case all those ideas came up because of a entirely different need , a need to make do with what little they had available , in our time although the need is different the ideas still hold true I guess.

I strongly feel there is need to educate each and everyone around us about how our wasteful ways are impacting the planet earth and ya this is the only one we have so we better get it right this time around because as you guessed there is no second chance on this one.