Global Warming

It doesn’t take scientific evidences to prove that global warming is indeed taking place now, and at a frightening speed. It is already so evident from everyday life, Jakarta is getting hotter and hotter everytime I came back and from the news around the world, typhoons and tropical storms in Japan and Philippines etc. In fact, one of my Philippines friend from college passed away due to landslide that swept away her home and others in Philippines. That was the first time that such natural disaster felt very close to me, as so far I only saw it from safe distance on TV.

The question now is, what can we do about it? We are just common people who knows nothing about green technologies or carbon-reduction technologies. And little that we can do to prevent those big greedy companies from cutting down our tropical forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan.  But I believe that there are always something that we can do, no matter how small they are.

From my living experience in Tokyo, I was very impressed on how advanced Japan is in regards to preserving their environment. A lot of shops, especially grocery shops, will charge small amount of money if you need plastic bags. So most of people will bring their own shopping bags and that was what I did too. Tokyo neighbourhoods also impose a very (and I mean, very) strict garbage disposal rules. Garbage must be separated according to their material, such as papers, plastic, PET bottles, raw, glass, etc. Not only we have to think which garbage goes to which category, but also we have to remember which days certain garbage needs to be thrown away for collection, otherwise you will end up with that garbage for the next few days or even for a week. Try to throw away garbage that is not supposed to be collected on that day or not separating your stuffs, and you will end up with a note stuck on your garbage bag telling you to separate it. It was a very frustating experience at first, but I do think that this is a very good education for people that protecting environment is not only government or activist’s job, but it all starts with the people like ourselves.

How about in Indonesia? Well, it is obvious that Indonesia is far behind Japan in regards to this matter. Everytime I go to supermarket, I often see the cashier staffs generously putting our goods into lots of plastic bags, even though there are stil lots of spaces in the other bags. Garbage? Well, we just need one rubbish bin for all kinds of stuffs :-p Recently I have been bugging my mum about the importance of doing our part to help environment (hahaha), so I’ve been telling her to bring our own shopping bag everytime we go groceries shopping and not taking so many plastic bags. It seems to be quite a successful campaign since now she’s the one telling the cashier staff not to use so many plastic bags and to put the stuffs into the available bags..hahaha..

Recently I also saw more and more supermarkets selling reusable shopping bags, even though I haven’t quite seen many people using it. I also saw that one of big supermarket chain advertised their new shopping bag which was designed by one of Indonesian famous fashion designers which was quite fashionable. I definitely want to use the bag 😀 Hopefully all those efforts will encourage people to do more for the environment..

So, there is really no need for rocket science to do our part to help our environment, right?