The World Health Organisation recently released findings from a two year report on the impact of an unhealthy environment. It revealed more than one in four deaths of children under five are attributable to environmental risks such as indoor and outdoor air pollution, second hand smoke, unsafe water, lack of sanitation and inadequate hygiene.
Living our beautiful country, we are lucky that most of these risk factors aren’t present but it doesn’t mean we should take it for granted. Our college participated in Clean Up Australia Day at the start of this month, with every stage participating and cleaning up areas in and around our grounds. We had close to 400 participants and the results were quite remarkable.
We filled up our college skip bin AND a caged box trailer with 360 kilograms of rubbish from the areas. We found lounges, building materials and some car parts but most of the waste were bottles, cans and plastic wrappers, most of which are recyclable.
It will be interesting to see how Clean Up Australia goes next year with the introduction of the cash for containers scheme. Each bottle and can will have a value attributed to it meaning that our waste will be valuable to us, hopefully encouraging more vigilant recycling.
It is sad that it does take money to motivate us to take more care with how we dispose of our containers. You would think just the satisfaction of having a pristine environment that is free from waste is enough. Maybe we aren’t savvy to the actual damage waste can cause, for example, emerging environmental hazards such as electronic and electrical waste (old mobile phones, computers and tablets) that are improperly recycled, expose children to toxins which can lead to reduced intelligence, attention deficits, lung damage, and cancer. The generation of electronic and electrical waste is forecasted to increase by 19 per cent between 2014 and 2018, to 50 million metric tonnes by 2018.
So what can we do to help? Promote recycling in your home, ‘Take 3 for the Sea’, buy food items in bulk, use reusable bags when shopping, start a worm farm or compost bin and be mindful of the footprint you are leaving for future generations.
Sources
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2017/pollution-child-death/en/
http://www.who.int/ceh/publications/ceh-Infographics-2017-english.pdf?ua=1
http://www.cleanupaustraliaday.org.au/
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