Plastics in our hands

What do you do with plastics in your hands daily? For sure, each of us encounter plastics as we go through our tasks and routine every day.

What are these plastics?

The soap you use, shampoo/toothbrush/toothpaste, the coffee/cream sachet at breakfast, the food/candy wrappers, juice/water containers, and many more. Would you like to list and weigh all other daily plastics in your hands and share your info with us?

More importantly, please share with us what you do with all these plastics in your hands?

The most common would be to throw and dispose of these plastics away from our hands. Inside jeepneys, after eating peanuts or drinking juice or water from a single-use plastic, the regular habit of most is to throw these from inside moving vehicles.

Then, there are the streets wherever people pass through. These can be the roads where you live in, those you take going to your work and back to your home.

Or you may have garbage containers at home or at work or in other public places. These bins are mostly for unsegregated waste.

From these garbage containers, the garbage collection trucks come and bring your plastics, including all other wastes from you and your household and communities, to dumpsites and landfills.

Your plastics end up in Binaliw and Inayawan, hectares of public lands dedicated to garbage. Other plastics end up in canals, in creeks, in rivers and some reach the oceans, far, far away from your hands and from where you are safely/comfortably located.

There are those who recycle their plastics or trade these. Sadly, some of these traded plastics are burned and incinerated.

Some plastics, therefore, end up not only in water bodies, eaten by fish, with these fish and other seafoods eaten by humans. Others are up in the clouds, up in our skies. The plastics in our hands end up harming the earth, God’s creations.

There are those who try to avoid, reduce, or prevent themselves from having plastics in their hands. They refuse to have plastics straws/spoons and forks, or, their drinks in plastic cups.

Eco-friendly hotels have refillable containers for soap, shampoo, body lotion. Groceries and shops use paper bags and cartons for items bought by customers.

While there are many who sincerely try to keep the plastics away from harming our earth, there are those who mindlessly/irresponsibly ignore the harm their produced, manufactured and distributed plastics bring.

The world was without plastics for many centuries. When plastics, however, were introduced, now the world and humans think they cannot do without plastics from here on.

What about you? Can you do without plastics each day?

Most likely, much as we like to answer yes, plastics are all over, a daily item in our hands.

Until plastics are completely banned, its production stopped, alternative plastics are available, the plastics are in our hands daily.

If plastics contribute to harming our people and our planet, if plastics come from our hands, can we at least try to help prevent our own plastics from harming our world, others, and ultimately us?

If you have creative, doable suggestions about what to do with our plastics daily, that will be helpful to protect ourselves, people and planet, not only for our generation but for all generations from now on, do please send these to us in our email address here at The Freeman or to ceburce@gmail.com?

The second month of this New Year 2024 will end today. February, the month of love, Valentine’s celebration will give way to our third month, March.

Our Love Our Earth campaign for this love month will, however, not end this month.

We hope you can all join us keep up the faith and commitment to protect our earth, ourselves from harmful wastes coming from our hands, including plastics!