End culture of disposables to save the planet

This year, Earth Hour was marked on March 24 with millions of people around the globe turning off non-essential electric lights for an hour as a sign of commitment to rejuvenate the planet.

Organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature, what started as a one-off event in Sydney, Australia, has by now drawn in thousands of towns and cities across 187 countries and territories (according to the WWF).

In the run-up to Earth Hour, a number of promotional campaigns and awareness-rising videos were doing the rounds. One that stood out was a social experiment — or you could call it an effort to humanise what the wildlife on the planet is going through — carried out by WWF Earth-Hour, UK.

This involves a healthy young man volunteering to remain restricted to a certain apartment under undisclosed conditions. As he enters it, the apartment is comfortable, well-furnished and stocked with plenty of food.

While he sleeps on the first day, most of the food is removed, in a nod to food sources for the animal kingdom increasingly shrinking because of human activity.

On the second day, the volunteer agonises mainly about food; but there’s more to come. That night, all the furniture is removed from the apartment, indicating the rapidly shrinking habitat for wildlife across the world — the loss of comfort and a liveable environment. Every week, says the WWF, an area of forest the size of London is destroyed.

The next night, the now-stripped-bare flat is filled up with garbage, mainly plastic waste — in the kitchen drawers and sink, the bathroom, strewn across the floor, choking the drains. (By many accounts, the oceans are filling up with non-degradable waste at such a speed that by 2050 they may well contain more plastic in them than fish.)

That day is spent by the volunteer clearing it all up, grimacing in disgust and eventually ending up with nine garbage bags full of stinking waste. But, though he’s managed to clean the place up, he still has hardly any food and no furniture other than a mattress to sleep on. Could it possibly get any worse?

One in six species is at the risk of extinction due to climate change, says the WWF. So the next ordeal to be suffered by the young man is a significant ramping up of the temperature in the apartment, through the removal of sun-shielding blinds and the installation of room heaters, leaving the volunteer to, as he says in the video, “cook”. And the night after that, as he sweats in his sleep, not just is his bedroom again strewn with heaps of plastic trash, the door is locked so that he is confined to a fraction of the “habitat” that he is used to.

Hungry, with no access to food or water, no means with which to clear up the filth in his living space, and the temperature rising all the time — there are no further possibilities to adapt. The volunteer begs to be let out, for the experiment to come to an end — he has lasted just six days under conditions that increasingly life on the planet has to contend with.

The factors that are putting wildlife under stress are aptly represented in this brief piece of footage. Yet when the big picture is put together — and there are, thankfully, many concerned individuals and organisations working on this — one of the biggest scourges of our times is plastic trash. When invented, it was hailed as a great step forward for humanity’s convenience — and it was.

But in the decades since of mass production and mass proliferation, the use of the material has been grossly exploited, leading to a “throwaway” culture worldwide with little concern about where it is all to end up and what it will poison.

So it is that a movement of sorts is slowly building up against, first, single-use plastic products (disposable bottles, straws, cups, etc), second, the drastic reduction of waste from households (requiring people to put pressure on purveyors to use less packaging, which is especially an issue in several Western countries, and more environmentally friendly packaging where necessary), and third, to recycle wherever possible.

Of the last, Sweden is a good example given that it imports garbage from other countries to feed its recycling plants that in turn churn out energy.

The irony for developing nations, which stand most affected by pollution and climate change, is that such eco-friendly practices where not so long ago the norm: jute shopping baskets, containers woven out of natural materials such as hemp, etc.

Even as the developed world is trying to take steer a course for a more sustainable future, the developing world is sinking heedlessly into the culture of disposables and needless waste.

By arrangement with Dawn