Observations and views, on being environmentally responsible, translated…
Reproduction Brings About Consumerism, Consumerism Stimulates Productions, Mass Consuming Causes Mass Productions; from Consuming Becoming Wasteful, it’d Become, a Matter-of-Fact, and this Turns Over the Belief of Cherishing What One Owns Completely………
In the 1980s, the Taiwanese people faced the influx in the diagnoses of hepatitis, and, it’d sparked great interests, and, we were able to find the TWO primary causes.
One was, from the shared eating utensils at the meals, the spoons, chopsticks, stirring around in the big bowl of foods being shared, with the mixtures of people’s saliva, that, was how the illness was spread.
The educated people kept trying to stop sharing the saliva when they eat, and started the belief of using a separate spoon or chopsticks for separate dishes, it’s not that hard, to implement this rule, and there’s no conflicts, and it was, easily, taken into practices by the public, and, this slowly, became the basic courtesy when people sit around a table to eat now.
Later on, they’d found, that having the separate chopsticks and spoons doesn’t do anything for hepatitis B and C, because the slow-to-act viral kind of hepatitis was spread by blood contact, for instance, from the mother, to the child directly, the most common was through the injections from a glass syringe. But, it’d, made ITS own contributions to “public health practices”.
The second observation was that the restaurants big and small, in the cleaning and washing of the plates, the bowls, the cups, the chopsticks, to save the water, they were all, mixed together inside that large sink, using just a bucket of water, to wash it up, the water was always reused, and the vegetables, just rinsed under the running water, and not sanitized, and, the workers often used that same rag, to wipe down the tables, to dry up all the spoons, the chopsticks, the bowls, the plates too.
Other than advocating separating the eating utensils, the “educated groups” wrote a ton of essays to discredit this way of a trend, and started pushing forth the ideas of “separate spoons, common chopsticks on the tables”, and advocated the use of disposable eating utensils.
In the trend of American fast-food coming into the country, with the cultures of the consumers altering, in the acting up of needing conveniences, after the wages were adjusted a little bit higher, and the lack of human resources, what was more up to date was the plastic making industries, grabbed a hold of the business opportunities, and, mass-produced an assortment of disposable eating utensils, and finally, that had, taken over the society, and, everybody else living in this society all followed the trends.
Sorrows! This “innovation of the New Age” had, brought even MORE damages to the environment, and the people who pushed forth this ideal from way back when didn’t see this coming at all!
What was meant by disposable eating utensils are what can be tossed away after use, other than the cups, most of the plates, the bowls, the boxed meals, the spoons………are mostly made with either plastic or Styrofoam, and, every pair of non-reusable chopsticks had that plastic covering over it too………
If, basing off of statistics, what would all the disposable eating utensils that each restaurant throws away every day be? Every single day, from breakfast, lunch, to the boxed up dinners, and even the snacks as well as the midnight snacks too, how many people had, taken that plastic bag, double-coated, and then, throw away after use?
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Is it really, that difficult, to bring your own chopsticks and spoons out? You can have that bag of things pack up inside your cars or inside a bag, hung on the hooks of your motorcycles, with a small bit of environmentalism beliefs, it wouldn’t, be all that hard, to put the theories into actions.
Every time I’d gone out, I would always have a backpack, and inside my backpack, other than my identification, my notebook, I’d always packed my own eating utensils, my water bottle, I’d gotten used to it, it’s, very convenient to me.
Recalling how if way back, the government didn’t push forth the policies of disposable eating utensils and instead, they’d tried to completely sterilized the materials, to implement the policies, alongside with pushing forth bringing your own eating utensils, to set up the policies, at least that way, the problems of those overflowing with waste material landfills, the indigestions of the incinerators, should be easily avoidable, and can be reduced too.
And now, more and more people are feeling alarmed, and, asked themselves to set up a good model, to try to reduce the impacts on the environment, but these were numbered, and are only influential in smaller parts; there were the leaders of the counties, the local governments who were pushing forth the banning of the disposable eating utensils too, but, it’d not become, common, as the policies still lacked the conveniences, the equipment, to implement the policies completely. If everybody can use one less, throw away one less plastic bag, a cup for water, a set of disposable eating utensils, etc., etc., etc., ………….so long as we’re determined to make it work, there will be a way, to improve, the reductions in productions, of plastic products to the bare minimum. Then, why would there be a need, to build any more incinerators? Why would there be needs, to chop down more trees, taking up the mass areas of the forests, to have those trash burial sites?
So, it’s still a habit kind of thing, it’s because we’re so used to having those non-reusable eating utensils provided to us by the restaurants, the road-side stands, but now, a lot of the shopfronts are becoming more and more environmentally aware, and started using the reusable, the rewashed chopsticks, and spoons, and, this is still a nation-wide action, not just from the single persons, but, it wouldn’t hurt, if it’d, started with just one!
