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| Manage escalating household waste this festival season | | | Dr. Pragya Khanna
It is festival time again.
There is celebration
for every religious occasion and change of season. It is the time when people gather together, linked by ties of shared social and religious beliefs. Vibrant colours, music and festivities make all of us come alive with celebrations and shopping sprees. All of us tend to have a long wish list before we hit the markets and yearn to own everything we desire. However, just give in a moment to recall everything you bought last summer. And where is that stuff now? A few articles might be in use but some might have reached the store room, perhaps because they are worn out or maybe out of fashion or maybe you didn't quite like them after bringing them home. The rest might have reached the dumping site already.
Buying the latest items or following trends is what everyone does. But incessant buying and wasting is the most recent approach that not only is bad for our budget, upsets the household, reduces the space, spoils the kids but adds to the burden on our planet. Every year thousands of tonnes of rubbish and waste is poured in landfill sites across the world. The waste (most of the time) is unnecessary and unusable. Eventually these landfill sites will fill up, and in the meantime the amount of energy of toxic air they give off are damaging to our earth's natural balance. By following the next few steps, you can cut down your own family's household waste. Doing this will set a great example for your children and encourage them to look after their planet too.
One very common approach is that when you go to the supermarket to buy your weekly shop, be sure to take your reusable bags with you. By doing this you'll be avoiding the waste of all those little plastic bags which you'd be using otherwise. Next, try and use little baskets or papers bags for bagging your vegetables and fruit, this will save you throwing away the disposable clear plastics bags.
In the pre-historic times, people used leaves and hides for clothes. People in due course learned to weave cloth from natural fibres such as wool and cotton. Our grand and great-grand parents took care of their clothes and reused them to make new things when they had outworn their usefulness.
Today people have many more clothes and keep buying them every now and then and throw them away when they no longer want them.
Recent statistics estimate that 700,000 tons of fabric ends up in the landfills each year! We all have old clothes that we no longer wear, with a little inspiration, we can reuse old clothes to make something usable! We have a number of articles in our house ranging from old utensils to old mats, to curtains, to furniture to old stationery and what not, the list is endless which if used in some other form can again become useful and the activity would be interesting and fun and would save a lot of money and pollution on earth.
One can try this craft project to make quick and easy work of creating a tote from an old T-shirt. Simply sew the bottom of the T-shirt closed using a machine, and then adorn the same with fabric paint.
Your hands will be warm and comfy if you repurpose that old sweater into a pair of mittens. Create a chic, green look at the same time. If you can operate a sewing machine, you can make these mittens. Old discarded Jars can be given a new look and can be used to store just about anything. They can also be used as a creative container for a gift. Reusing an old sock to cover a jar gift will add more homemade charm. If you need some more pillows, you can make cute T-shirt pillows by sewing and stuffing them with rags either with their sleeves on or by simply cutting them off.
Old sheets or table clothes that are worn can be transformed into placemats and napkins for your table. Any clothing that you wish to reuse or recycle can be made into placemats, but old sheets and table clothes usually have enough size to make matching sets. Just cut any seams or worn parts of the fabric off and use as you would use new material. You';ll also need some ribbons or lace or decorative material like small mirrors or beads and a sewing machine.
If you have piles of old, worn out towels and a bare bathroom floor, then it';s time to make a braided towel bathroom rug. This rug is quick and easy to make and will last for years. Best of all, it is 100% washable and guaranteed to never shrink, since you are using old towels. So get braiding and finish off your new towel rug.
It is so helpful to have paper note pads around the house for writing things down - next to the phone, on a night stand, and on desk. These are just a few places where thoughts occur or important information needs to be written down. Recycling paper products can provide you with notepads for your home. To make your own note pads, gather waste paper in the form of envelopes, paper bags, letter, cards and other items. Remember, as long as paper has one clean side, you can still use it!
Use a paper cutter to cut the paper into a manageable size. Four by six inch rectangles works well for me. Then, simply stack the paper and staple it two or three times on ones side to create a notepad. The pages need not match so you can use many different types of paper. For more formal writing, create your own recycled stationery. Use a paper cutter to trim several sheets of waste paper to the same size. The number of pages you need depends on how long your letter is going to be. Old wrapping paper, computer paper and even magazine pages can work well for this project. Just make sure the paper is blank on one side. To decorate the stationery, use ink stamps, stickers or even sequins and glitter. Why stop at letter paper? You can make your own recycled paper envelopes for sending your letter from recycled calendars.
Do you have empty champagne bottles or wine bottles? Well, take sequin strings in 'WOW" colors and wind them around the bottles in two tones like half and half. Voila, you just created a decorative piece. Empty beer bottles in browns and greens are good ways to keep just a single flower stem in each.
Newspapers come daily at your doorstep, right. What are you waiting for - you can go wild creating Paper Mache. Just tear the paper in strips, soak them in PVA glue mixed with equal parts of water and mould it in the desirable form. You can make table lamps; give 3D effects on a canvas board, ply board, pots, walls or even the ceiling… A slightly messy job, but it's worth it.
Take a wooden plank like the trunk of a tree just sliced to give it that plate look say a diameter of a foot. Get some broken mirror pieces and randomly stick them onto the wood. Stick a small wood piece, a small square will do just the right size to hold a candle and place it at the lower half, leaving just 2 inches from the bottom of the plate. Hang the plate and light the candle to reveal many little lights reflecting through those mirrors. I am sure most of you have bangles, which you do not wear too often. Do not want to give it away either. Well! try this out, take a thin cardboard sheet, and roll it to the desired length for a pen stand and stick the ends secure. Next fix a base with another piece of card and start stacking up bangles in an orderly fashion or even the haphazard fashion looks unique. When you have finished with it, decorate the base and mouth of the stand with a fancy border. There, you have your fancy stationery stand.
Whether we like it or not, domestic waste is a normal part of everyday home life; putting the trash out is considered a chore at the same level as tidiness, yet more and more households are finding themselves with high levels of trash, thanks largely to an increasingly consumer lifestyle with a whole range of food wrappers, product packaging, food waste and other materials that people want to get rid of. We buy food items in plastic bags or disposable containers and throw them away. Plastic disposable containers can be used for growing plants. Spoiled paper tumblers and broken glasses can be used as candle stands after nicely decorating them.
Old fashioned shopping lists weren't developed simply out of the need to remember goods to purchase. They were also made to help shoppers stick to the items they needed. Since much of society did away with making lists, impulse spending has rocketed sky high, with consumers buying goods they would never have imagined purchasing went they left their homes for shopping.
Studies show that individuals spend more money, and are more likely to shop impulsively when they have money in their wallets, or a credit card to hand. To prevent over-spending it';s wise to only take the amount of cash needed when out on a shopping trip, and to leave your credit card behind if possible, or at least to set a spending limit. |
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