Managing Household Waste: Reducing, Reusing, Recycling

REDUCING, REUSING, RECYCLING

Name: Laura Rodríguez Álvarez,  B2.1-B

The amount of waste which we generate every day is growing exponentially, because although less children are born, our life expectancy is greater, and in particular countries in the “First World” generate most of the garbage which is damaging our environment. Although we want to revert this huge problem we don’t always do everything we can, and therefore the ozone layer is badly damaged, although fortunately not everything is lost.

One of the problems is that we usually buy too much food, therefore we throw it away when it’s soft. Instead of this a solution is, for instance, if the fruit is too ripe we can make a healthy cake, milkshake or smoothy;  besides, the fruit that is soft is very sweet so our cake doesn’t need any extra sugar. We can also do this with soft vegetables and instead of a cake we could make a healthy vegetable pie.

About the problem of excessive packaging we should avoid buying plastic bottles. Instead of this we should buy in bulk or another option is to buy glass bottles or glass jars which we will reuse. For instance, when we buy fried tomato or olives in glass bottles later we can use them to keep other things or even food to freeze, so we will avoid the typical plastic lunchboxes.

In conclusion, not everything is lost, we can still turn it around, and improve our planet. We only need to take little steps for the change to start to happen. The simple fact of recycling at home is a good first step. For instance, separating organic and inorganic waste, and within this, paper, plastic, tins, etc: separate them for later recycling.