Leanda Lee
For those who remember Kermit the Frog, “it’s not easy being green.” We can try very hard but unless the infrastructure is available, minimising our carbon footprint is difficult; almost impossible in Macau.
It started for me upon arrival on these shores, as for the first time I could see the volume of waste that was put out nightly by neighbours. Most of us share a single rubbish disposal room on our apartment-block floors. This offers some insight into neighbourly habits that we wouldn’t get in our homes of origin unless we choose to be creepily voyeuristic.
I felt bad enough that my vegie scraps were to be dumped in with everything else (I considered a worm farm for a moment) but in those rubbish rooms could be found beautiful things: decorative tins (especially at this moon-cake time of year), hardly used kids toys and pre-loved clothes among the putrid refuse of polystyrene take-away containers and the stench of dripping plastic bags.
Refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle. This is the new mantra for environmentalists on a mission. Note that recycling is the very last option. The first is to refuse; as in plastic bags from the supermarket, or unnecessary freebies. I have given up buying any fruit or vegetables wrapped in plastic but this is becoming more difficult. I’m refusing and doing without more produce and throw-away cup encased coffees than I used to. Thank goodness for the local markets and green grocers in Macau. They are still happy and unsurprised when we present our own boxes, shopping bags or baskets. Try doing that in some of the large supermarket chains in Australia or the USA. There, even some delicatessen scales have been modified removing the zeroing-out function that enabled tare weight to be calculated.
Reduce: With all our abundance one would think that one was easy. Culturally, reduction is anathema. Abundance implies wealth and status and importance, also hospitality and generosity. Such a value system is not readily changed, although calls for austerity from Beijing have started to put it on the agenda.
Reuse: Even that plastic bag that we didn’t refuse can get reused. Coffee cups – take your own. There was a wonderful article in the Detroit news last week about the local zoo no longer selling water in plastic bottles. They have put filtered water refilling stations throughout the grounds forgoing the USD250,000 income they used to make selling 62,500 bottles of water per year. Now visitors bring their own bottles or purchase a refillable souvenir one. The aim is to remove single-use plastic bottles from the environment. This will be an interesting initiative to follow and one that I would dearly like to see MGTO and Macau’s casinos emulate. Where there’s a will, there are ways around potential biohazards.
The ability, or perhaps it’s the time available in our days, to repurpose seems to have been lost. Cleaning cloths used to be old underpants or T-shirts. Towels and clothes beyond use were made into delightful bathroom mats. I remember cutting up old dresses into hexagonal shapes and helping my mother sew quilts but lack of time and that abundance-value thing got in the way. Cleaning out my father’s shed over summer I found old kettles, ice-cream containers, coated wire ties, worn sieves and rusty knives, all repurposed for the garden. Repurposing takes initiative and a bit of lateral thinking but now we seem to have to have the perfect gadget for every single task.
The fall-back position for minimal response to environmental issues emanating from an affluent society is recycling. Yet, there is no great clarity about what happens when we make the effort to take our waste to the IACM recycling depots around town for paper, metal, clean plastic bottles, New Year’s red packets and moon-cake boxes. Given 1) the hesitant response of our recently hired but long-term Macau domestic helper to my request to take recyclables down to the depot and 2) the fact that there’s always space in them, I have my doubts that Macau’s even a light shade of green.
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