Into the Driver's Seat

With delicacies at our fingertips and recipes beyond our wildest imagination, food can be recycled from scraps. Reducing our food consumption starts small. The key is to use bright tips to convert leftovers into something edible so as to prevent an excess of food wastage while helping to save the environment. In recent years, food consumption footprint has taken the globe by a storm, and hence there is a rising need to fix our bad habit and stop allowing our earth to bear the brunt of our decisions.

I think that food waste can be reduced in Singapore. After all, as a small country, measures to reduce food waste can be implemented more effectively as the population is more concentrated. While not many people are enthusiastic about eating unusual parts of an animal to reduce food waste, I think that simpler measures such as buying the appropriate amount of food to be eaten within their shelf life is a basic and simple means to reduce food waste. Such a measure helps people to understand how much food they really need and remind them not to buy too much food, resulting in food waste, and can also help them to reduce the amount of money spent on food to be used in other areas.

If I had looked at this picture without the context, I would think it was somewhere where people had stayed for a while and then left the place trashed with their own garbage.  In reality,  this is an island that is 3500 miles away from the nearest major settlement and doesn’t have any human inhabitants.  This really exemplifies that even though plastic waste may not be in one’s backyard, it never truly goes away.  Plastic is a material that cannot be broken down, so when it is dumped it just moves around until it hits land.  The article pointed out that plastic is incredibly difficult to clean up, particularly on places like Henderson Island.  When it floats in the ocean for a long time, it becomes brittle and breaks into very small fragments.  Those small fragments then mix with the sand and get buried, making it impossible to get rid of.  Another fact about this island that was shocking is that 3,750 pieces of litter wash up everyday, which is 100,000 times than other islands.  Henderson Island is not suitable for humans to live on, as there is no freshwater, frequent storms, and incredibly sharp terrain.  It is interesting that an island that keeps humans away can’t defend itself against plastic.  The reach of humans extends far beyond what they imagine and even uninhabitable land is infested with human waste.  No matter how remote a place is, it will still be effected by people.

Although a remote place like Henderson Island is uninhabited, the amount of trash that blankets its shores should still be alarming to humans. It is highly visual evidence of the damage that human waste is having on the earth as a whole. If this much trash if landing on the shores of an island, which is surely degrading the environmental quality and ecosystem, then how much trash lies underneath the waves of our blue planet? This means that coral reefs, the source of fish, and ocean water that transforms into water vapor forming clouds is all contaminated. If something ends up in the oceans, it will eventually end up in our food chain. The marred beaches of Henderson Island illustrate what is happening to nature's cycles. 

It is sickening to see how a uninhabited island can still be ruined by human products. People need to realize that they are hurting more and more islands and need to open their eyes. With people so far away we can still effect ecosystems terribly.