In Other Words

Singapore's environment

Lets talk about Singapore in relation to the environment. It’s not often that these words are used together. Thats probably because they don't really like each other. Lets be honest about it, Singaporeans are about as environmentally friendly as they are politically free. Granted, it all looks pretty and beautiful, but scrape at the surface and (in both cases) things are discovered that some people would prefer hidden and most Singaporeans don’t even really want to think about.

Lets start with the stats, Singapore is:
-The 10th biggest producer of CO2 per capita in the world.
-Even if we look at Singapore’s CO2 emissions overall, in comparison to all the other countries in the world, this one city still ranks in the top 50.
-Singapore consume the most oil per capita in the world at more than 1.5 barrels of oil per day per person.
-Singapore is the second biggest creator of solid waste per capita in Asia, (first is Japan).

I could find more statistics, but I think you get the idea. I’ve always thought that Singaporean are very environmentally unfriendly and now I have some statistics to prove it. Do these figures surprise any of you? Probably not. We all know it, somewhere, but we don't do much about it.

Example: Couple walks into seven eleven, buy a couple of nuts bars (with plastic wrappers), two cans of coke (metal) and a sandwich (plastic wrapper). Each of these, in turn, gets wrapped in a plastic bag (you wouldn’t want your sandwich wrapping getting cold and wet from the can, would you?) and then, for their convenience, all of these bags get wrapped in yet another plastic bag. That’s four plastic bags for a total of three different items. Couple walks outside, to a bench, finish their food in five minutes and, this is the best part, throw all the plastic bags into a garbage can insight of the seven eleven. 'What you expect loh? I no going to walk around with them!'

Cold storage uses ten bags to wrap eight items, most people then just throw these bags away ‘I have enough bag at home, already! I no need no more, leh’ People all over the world are slowly realising that the environment isn’t doing all that well, that everything isn’t going as well as originally thought. The head of Shell recently admitted that global warming was a more important problem then terrorism (Shell, that’s an oil company. They have a stake in keeping up oil consumption) and the reaction in Singapore? ‘It doesn't affect us, our streets are clean!’.

The only thing Singapore does do is recycle it's water and the only reason it does that is not because it wants to help the environment, but because of strategic reasons. National defense, yes, world environment, they can worry about that outside of our bubble world. If push comes to shove and everything does go to sheet? Well, then we'll just build a dome over the island and tax our citizens for the clean air! That wont be that hard, we've already got a working dome model at the Esplanade!

Do something for the environment, refuse the plastic bags, print on both sides of the paper, turn of the aircon when you're not in the room and make other Singaporeans aware that clean streets does not necessarily mean clean conscience.

Interesting fact: In an expected forty years the glaciers that feed the Ganges will disappear and, as a result, the Ganges will dry up. The fertile fields that depend on the Ganges to feed all of India will then, obviously enough, not be so fertile anymore. That’s within our lifetime, people.

posted by Symbol @ 20.8.04