CNY – Painting the town green

I think we’ve tamed the beast that is Chinese New Year. Whereas in the past, we used to visit too many places, exhaust ourselves and eat too much, we’ve trimmed the visiting to more manageable levels, bought less food and drinks, and so come away from the holiday much healthier and happier than before.

Did I say tame the beast? Maybe not completely, if you consider the sort of waste that we generate with our merry-making.

To save effort in washing, some meals were served with disposable plates, bowls and cutlery. And it was so easy to just hand someone a tin of beer or soft drink, or to pour drinks into disposable cups, to spare the host some drudgery.

As a person who once wanted to run away from the festivities because of the drudgery of cooking, cutting, serving and washing up, I don’t blame anyone who opts for convenience.

However, this year, I decided to see how I could spread the greenish message a bit.

Everywhere I went, I asked my hosts to put their plastic soft drinks bottles into bags for me to take away for recycling or reusing. The same went for the beer tins and empty wine bottles.

No one turned me down, though they were a tad bemused at first. Someone asked, ‘surely all this gets sorted out by the garbage people?’ Alas, no. It just goes to the incinerator with the rest of the stuff and gets burnt. That’s why they ask us to sort things out and throw them into the recycling bins.

Recycling the aluminium tins goes a long way – depending on who you ask, it either requires 95 percent less energy to make a new tin from recycled material than from mining the stuff, refining it and so on, or the energy taken to make a tin from scratch can be used to make 16 tins from recycled aluminium.

I managed to pass that little tidbit on to one or two people who asked me why I was doing this.

The plastic bottles went to my kind-hearted neighbour, who washes them out, fills them with water and puts them out for workmen to take – when she stopped once, they started knocking at her door to ask for water. This reusing works even better than recycling, though it isn’t quite as good as reducing, but who can reduce drinks during the New Year?

The tins were passed to the karang guni man, so he can make a couple of bucks as well as recycle them. The glass wine bottles were put out for the recycling truck.

Getting a few dozen tins, some wine bottles and plastic bottles recycled may not seem very much, but I’m hoping that, after a few years, I won’t be the eccentric relative anymore, and that more of the people who obliged me this year will be doing this themselves.

Now won’t that be a happy New Year?