Agnes Krocha
Came the month of February and children, big and small, started flocking to schools. Some little ones are more reluctant to go, it’s their first time at school but sweets are one way to lure them to their classes, while for some showing reluctance is just one means of getting more sweets. They just love sweets, don’t they? Willing or unwilling to go to schools, almost every child at school purchase sweets, toffees, chocolates, chewing gums, etc., which comes wrapped in colourful, attractive, glittering plastics or in some other form of wrappings, almost everyday of their schooling life. This is not to say that teachers, elders and others do not take sweets in various forms which come in wrappers- we all do! And as long as the sweet is good for our health and we are enjoying it I guess there’s no harm in buying them and taking them. But if we do a little math here, we’ll be surprised at how much waste an average school can generate by mere taking of sweets by the school children.
If a school has five hundred students and each child takes two sweets a day, we have one thousand sweet wrappers to throw in one day in that school. Many schools of course have more than that many students and most of the children take more than two sweets a day. But even at that ‘much below the minimum rate’, school children in Kohima alone can generate lakhs and lakhs of sweet wrappers everyday. This adds up to big trouble for the environment. The problem lies not much in buying and taking of sweets but in where the sweets wrappers go after the sweets are savoured. We are all very familiar with the ghastly sight littered sweet wrappers create. Besides the eyesore it creates, most sweet wrappers are non-biodegradable, being made of plastics, which means they are incapable of being decomposed by bacteria or other living organisms, which in turn means littered anywhere they remain eyesores for longer period of time degrading the environment.
So much is taught about the importance of preserving the environment nowadays in textbooks and various other sources. But just as an environmentally conscious and responsible person was telling me the other day, environmentalism is truly not just about planting trees, preserving wildlife and so on. It’s really not enough to learn about the importance of planting trees and of preserving the environment, we have to do something about it everyday. For environmentalism is also about the here and now, it’s about our daily lifestyle, which includes knowing where to throw that little sweet wrapper. This is one area where our school children can make a very big difference. If school children inculcate the habit of putting sweet wrappers in its rightful place, while they are young, problems relating to the maintenance of cleanliness in our homes, schools, streets, just everywhere, can slowly be dissipated. Almost every school provides waste bins a lot of which really goes waste because children are throwing wastes everywhere except into the waste bin. The waste bin culture must go beyond the classroom and schools should not produce any more litter bugs. Learning to put sweet wrappers into waste bins and not anywhere else is the first place to begin with. And that seemingly small deed will go a long way in preserving the environment.
(The writer has done M.Sc (Environmental Science and Technology) and B.Ed. She also writes and teaches science in a High School)
aggiekrocha@gmail.com
