How I help save Mother Earth (part 2)

On my first part of my article, I have mentioned about the candy wrappers that I kept in my pocket when there were no trash bins nearby. I also mentioned about segregation of trashes and reusable bags. Those were some of the ways that I show my help in saving our planet but that is not all as still have a few more.

Reusable straws and tumblers. I have bought some bamboo straws years ago and I always have one in my bag. But now that we are experiencing a pandemic, I don't get to use mine since we do not dine out anymore. I also bring my tumbler with me before so I get to save money from buying bottled water. Then if I know that my mom and I are going to eat in fast food restaurants, I also have an extra tumbler for my drink. I know that it was such a hassle to bring 2 tumblers but I have to bear with it because I really want to help save our environment. I don't know if reusable tumblers are now allowed because last year when I availed my free coffee drink, they told me that they do not allow tumblers for safety purposes. This pandemic has increased a lot of wastes from face masks, face shields, PPEs, plastics and bubble wraps for online shopping and paper or plastic utensils in restaurants. The plastic consumption and increased in wastes only got worse during this pandemic. How can we avoid those plastics and wastes? Through proper disposal? Yes! But it will only pile up in our landfills and worst is that it might only end up in our ocean.

Menstrual cup. I have already shared my experience in using it in one of my articles, my period cup. I know that there are still some girls who find it a little weird putting something inside of your Vs. However there is still another option and that is the reusable napkins that @Momentswithmatti shared before. Not only were you able to save money from buying sanitary pads every month but you also get to save our environment. Back in the days our mothers, grandmothers or great grandmothers have experienced using reusable menstrual cloth pads or what they call "pasador" in Filipino. Even our diapers when we were young were reusable cloth diapers or what we call "lampin". My mom still has it because she used it as our towel when we were kids and she would put it on our backs.

Online payments. Most of my bills payments were done through GCash, Philippine mobile wallet, even before the pandemic. It saves me the hassle of going out, falling in line and waiting for more or less than an hour before they can process my transaction. Now that we are in a tough situation, majority of us are now doing transactions online. Less carbon footprint. Hooray!

And what I love about GCash is that they have GForest in which I get to plant and grow real trees by the activities that I did on the app like sending money, paying bills, buying load and a lot more. Though I do not know if they really do plant those trees physically but I hope they do. They even added some trees but more on the Visayan region. But those trees will still have a greater impact especially for us Filipinos and our future generations.

Reuse plastic containers. You have probably heard or saw about Filipino moms using any plastic containers as storage. Even Jo Koy, American stand-up comic, talked about it. Most of us Filipinos can relate to reusing plastic containers for anything. As a kid we thought that we had ice cream but upon opening it was a raw frozen fish. LOL. Now we use the microwaveable plastic containers from restaurant take outs for our frozen and leftover items. But we still use the ice cream and biscuit containers for pots and other storage.

Greywater. Collecting the water that I have when washing my hands and taking a bath is being used to flush the toilet, water our plants and also to clean our dogs' pee in our surroundings. Less water consumption means less water bill. We need to save water.

I do not know if you have noticed some rich people drinking mineral water. What are your thoughts about it? They were even proud to have a refrigerator tour with their single use plastic bottles. Imagine how many bottles of 500ml mineral water they drink each day then multiply it to 365. Say hello to thousands of individual plastic bottles consumed by a single person. Companies will stop producing plastic bottles if consumers will also stop buying from them. Can we? I admit that I am guilty of buying a lot of products that were in plastic packaging like a bottle of softdrinks, sachets of detergents, coffee and whatnot. As much as we wanted to buy those in bigger sizes instead of individual sachets, our money is not enough. And I believe that is also the reason of the majority of my fellow Filipinos. We like buying in sachets because we can only afford those. I know that there are now a lot of alternatives in reducing our wastes but we have been accustomed to what we have done in the past.

Those are just some of the things on how I show my love and care for our environment. I also educate the people in our household about these things but sometimes it is very tiring to keep on repeating it to them over and over. Our helper even reasoned out to me that it was the garbage collectors job to segregate the trashes. Yet she kept on complaining that it was too hot during summer and that they have started to experience a couple of floods in their province a few years ago. I have explained to her that we are the cause of those but she insisted that the trash was not connected with it because it was the loss of the trees that had cause the floods.

Sometimes we only see what we think and believe is real. It will only change our perspective if we have experienced it in our own 2 eyes. I know that we can still have a better world to live in if all of us would do the right thing. I know it sounds impossible but with our battle with plastic, we all have to stand side by side and be part of the solution and not part of the pollution. If we needed to educate other people by writing and reminding them about the dangers that it can do to all of us, I know that they will soon realize it. Let us be a role model to other people by showing them how we want to have a better place to live in.