By: Anuradha
Environment pollution has become the major concern of many countries over the world. Even though people have been warned about the bad consequences of using no-degradable materials, still a reduction cannot be observed in the consumption of plastic and polythene. Many people believe that recycling is a solution to this problem and they continue using plastic but something that we should know is that recycling alone will not solve this huge problem. In 2013, 254 million tonnes of trash was produced in the US alone and only 30% was recycled. So, the rest ended up in landfills and will stay there up to 1000 years. It will result in creating toxic gases, polluting the land and killing thousands of innocent animals. A plastic package that you use for a couple of seconds will take up to 1000 years to decay and that is why we need to pay more attention to this issue.
Image Credit & More info: Perfect Homes Chiangmai
In order to start a positive change, supermarkets across Asia have started using leaves to pack their vegetables.
This package is cost-effective and more than anything it is environment-friendly. China, who used to import trash from all over the world has now stopped the procedure and they have started to concentrate on their own waste. Before this, 30% of the world’s waste would end up in China and that is why many people thought that Asian countries are responsible for creating the majority of the waste in the world. Now, Asian countries including Thailand and Vietnam are looking for ways to avoid plastic and one of the ideas that came up in this mission us to use eco-friendly packing ways to avoid plastic packaging.
Perfect Homes Chiangmai’s post about this type of wrapping quickly went viral.
One member of the team saw that Rimping supermarket was using these packages and he captured some pictures of the shelves. When he uploaded them it went really viral and got 3.5 million views and over 17000 shares. One of the team members of Perfect Homes Chiangmai said that,
“We just popped in to get a few items while we were waiting to sign some contracts with our lawyer, who was delayed, so we were not even meant to be there at that time. When I noticed the veg wrapped in banana leaves and simply liked the idea and showed my wife who picked a few up to buy. I thought I would take a few pictures and just post to the page, and that was it.
I had no idea it was going to go viral, I was shocked when it hit 20 shares. It was not until the morning while I was in the gym that I started to realized what was happening, I pointed out to Stig my friend that it had now something like a thousand shares ad that this was crazy. Once we had finished the session an hour later it had nearly doubled that is when it really started to go off!”
“I feel it is now up to the shoppers to show the supermarket which they prefer. Because without a doubt if everyone opts for the banana leaf packaging then they will stop stocking the items in plastic and this will also drive other great ideas forward.”
Every piece of plastic that was ever made still exists on this planet.
This new idea started a discussion only about plastic consumption worldwide.
So, next time when you are going to buy something plastic, please think twice and if you think creatively, you will come up with more ways to create a plastic-free world!