Rant 279 / In China, They Eat Kentucky Fried G (鸡).

Noticed something today. The recycle bins across the road were overflowing with trash. Some good people must be throwing their recyclables there. Unfortunately, there was so much left outside the bins, it must have been just over an arm's length away from the edge of the heap to the bin's opening.

This illustrates how inadequate our recycling industry is to suit the needs of everyone. Though plastic is cheap here, since we have a prosperous oil refining industry, we need to do more to recycle our wastes. Paper is one major reason for recycling. Plastic is also getting more expensive as oil prices rise.

We need to be more conscious about recycling and understand that we shouldn't just throw everything into them like regular bins. We need to have more bins in every void deck, not just for every few blocks.

Food scraps from our many food courts and etc around the island should be recycled. It is easy to do so since all the cleaners remove them from the food containers before sending them for cleaning. All those bags containing the food scraps can be collected easily to be reused. No matter if they all contain tissue papers, everything organic can be recycled into fuel or manure.

I have often seen my family throwing good reusable trash into the bin simply because we have no more use for them and we don't have the space to keep everything. Disposable food containers, glasses, bottles and etc are just some of the things I find wasteful each time I put them into our bins.

New residential buildings should start having multiple chutes for recyclables and non-recyclables so that we can recycle wastes right from our homes. 4 chutes, 3 for recycles and one for everything else.

Even our electronics should be recycled. All our electrical appliances contain many harmful substances that shouldn't be exposed to the environment. Silicon, for one, isn't exactly bio-degradable.

We should have another method for disposing such trash, maybe a special dumping ground at our void decks just for our handphones, computers and TVs. Broken or not, the chips within are always worthed something.

I remember many years ago when a part-time cleaner from the Phillipines came to my home and saw an old computer lying on the floor, ready to be thrown away. She asked my mum if we wanted it, if she could take it and send to her son who could use it for his studies. We were totally fine with that and so she carried the CPU with her when she left that day. It wasn't faulty, just too old for the games we wanted to play.

I believe many Singaporeans out there have such outdated computers or CPU components. This problem needs to be addressed if Singapore still wants to be a "green" city. It may be green on the outside with all the trees and grass, but few of our daily habits are actually green at all.

I didn't see anyone use the recycle bins when I was living in the NTU halls in the past sem. Only the newspapers from the lounge were thrown there. I believe I was one of the handful of people who used those bins there. Everyone else were too lazy earning their grades and ignoring what our future really looks like apart from the monetary point of view.

Recycle your stuff for a while, for a few months. You'll find that after that, you'll feel a little guilty each time you throw recyclables into regular bins.







Applied for GIP just now. I'm pretty sure I don't qualify for it, with my shitty GPA. I just hope my position in the NTUTMC Exco will make my application look better. Also described my trip with the NTUTMC to HK where I made many friends just to make me sound good for such an exchange programme.