Wednesday, 2 December 2009

Five eco-crimes we commit everyday

Global warming is the important topic that will be discussed between the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next month. In the article "Five eco-crimes we commit everyday" in New Scientist, Dave S. Reay suggests us to prevent global warming by changing our 5 habit. The five habits are drinking coffee, using toilet paper, changing fashion, doing laundry, and wasting food.
Coffee itself isn't the cause of global warming; however, using cup of black filter coffee can produces CO2 152 gram. If we still drink coffe six days a week, The CO2 emission will be at least 175 kilograms each year. Also, milk added in the coffee is produces from cow that bleaches methane that is a cause of climate change. This fact is surprising. I have never thought that what a problem we have done with our world when we drink coffee. Drinking coffee is our daily habit that is difficult to change.
The toilet papers made from new wood use more electricity to produce than the recycle ones. Although recycled toilet tissues are used in many countries, most people still like the softest and fluffiest toilet tissues which is made from new wood. When the demand of soft toilet paper is high, the production company try to complete by producing that new toilet tissues instead of the recycled ones. If the consumers don't stop buying toilet tissues made from new wood, our world will be warm and warmer.
Fashion trends have changed very fast especially in the summer. Because of fast fashion, the clothing and textile company have to produce more and more product. The production of these clothes emits CO2 more than 3 million tones each year. We can stop the climate change by recycling our clothes so that we don't have to buy a new one. In addition, we can mix and match our old clothes to make it looks like the new one.
Apart from Fashion, laundary wastes a lot of energy especially during the process of cleaning. The cleanliness of clothes is an ideal domestic life. We use more energy from electricity, water, and detergent to clean their clothes. It's hard to decrease this habit because we need to wear cleaning clothes everyday and no one will like the smell clothes. What we can do is that we should not change our clothes every often by trying to wear only 2 clothes per day ; day thime and night time.
The last one is food wastage. People throw away 30 percent of their food. The CO2 is splitted out to the environment form the food wastage. Furthermore,every process of food production and transportation produce a lot of green house gasses. Thus, if we throw away the food, it means that we waste a lot of energy without any advantages. The solution of this problem is buying food in the amount that we can eat. Moreover, keeping the food in the suitable way can stop rotten food.
Although we feel that these habit is very common in our society, they can make a lot of green house gasses that are the cause of global warming in our world.

Reference
Reay, D.S. (2009, December, 1). Five eco-crimes we commit everyday. New Scientist. Retrived December 2, 2009 from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427361.900-five-ecocrimes-we-commit-every-day.html?page=2

2 comments:

  1. I guess global warming is a hot topic these days, and the examples of the effects of various common behaviours did catch my interest.
    Do you think that we should stop drinking coffee? Is it something that governments should make laws to regulate because it affects human society generally?

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  2. I think government can't control people to stop drinking coffee by law. Most people especially the ones who addict coffee will protest that idea. They will argue that they have the right to drink coffee and that reason isn't enough to stop them drinking coffee. One thing that we can do to protect our world is that we can drink lesser coffee in each day. For example, if we drink 3 cups of coffee per day, we can decrease it to 2 or 1 cup per day.

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