Corporate Greed

Green Minds
Froilan Grate
www.froilangrate.com

Happy Earth Day!

This year, we are celebrating the 43rd Earth Day. The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970. Mr. Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, said “Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.”
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I realized I have so many things to say that a President’s Message wasn’t enough, so I started this column. The “perks” of being a president, I guess. Anyway, some of the things I wanted to say aren’t appropriate for a message anyway.
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The plastic industry has continuously attacked paper. It has conveniently pointed out that using more paper would entail cutting more trees, which is bad for the environment.
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In a series of news articles, it has claimed that banning plastic is bad for the environment. This is based on their twisted logic that banning plastic would increase the use of paper as packaging, and that paper is worse than plastic, ergo, banning plastic is bad for the environment.
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Yes, cutting of trees, especially from our primary forest is bad. But plastic is way more evil, no matter how you look at it. Paper is a renewable resource, especially if coming from managed forest, while petroleum, the raw material for plastic, is not. Paper is biodegradable, plastic is not.
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What the plastic industry has failed to acknowledge is that no one is pushing for paper as alternative to plastic as secondary packaging. What we have long advocated is the use of indigenous materials like bayong and baskets made from buri or pandan.
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By promoting the use of indigenous materials as alternative to plastic, we are able to create more jobs on the countryside. This would answer the claims of the plastic industry that a plastic ban would result to unemployment of a lot of people. How many workers are needed to create 1,000 plastic bags? Compare this to the number of women needed to weave your bayong or sew your katcha bag.
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Some major malls have falsely advertised that the bags they use are biodegradable when in fact they are not. Most of these bags are oxy-biodegradables, meaning they would degrade into smaller plastic pieces when exposed to sunlight. But that’s about it, at the end of the day they are still pieces of plastic. Yes, they may not aggravate our problem with flooding but they may still end up as plastic particles in the environment and eventually enter the food chain.
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Speaking of malls, I am sure you’ve heard about the SM Baguio fiasco. I won’t discuss the merits of the case here, but let me share two things that bother me about the issue. First, it’s not only about the 182 trees. The bigger picture is that companies like SM have no regard for the environment in their pursuit of profit.
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The second thing that bothers me is that for a customer-centric company like SM, it seems it doesn’t give a damn about public opinion. Does SM think it is too big to even care about its customers, or does it think the public doesn’t care about the issue? Whatever the case, the answer scares me.
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Send your feedback to froilan@motherearthphil.org, or follow me on Twitter.com/GreenMinds.