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Green is the new gold
15/06/2007 08:55 - (SA)
Georgina Guedes
London has changed since I was last here. A revolution has taken place and the watchword on everybody's lips is "green".
You may say that environmental awareness is old news. In South Africa we used to have Environment Week, where everyone rallied to save the planet, the ozone layer, the rainforest, the whales, whatever.
Then we all got aware, stopped using aerosols with CFCs, plugged the hole in the ozone layer, and forgot about the rainforests, the whales and whatever.
So, having given up CFCs at the huge personal sacrifice of having to switch deodorants until all brands complied, we in South Africa are now struggling with the concept that we should be reusing plastic bags.
Not keen on recycling
This is happening at a time when supermarkets in London are committing to eradicating all unnecessary packaging of products. Marks and Spencer, in particular, have planned that by 2012, they will be using no packaging that could end up in landfills.
In fish shops, not only the price per kilogram is labelled on each piece of seafood, but also the method of capture (choose line-caught instead of net-caught to prevent overfishing), whether the fish are farmed or wild (fish farms release pollutants into the ocean) and whether they are local or imported (anything imported has a carbon footprint from the emissions caused by air transport).
In South Africa, we feel virtuous if we lug our glass bottles to the recycling bin at a supermarket. I managed to keep a collection of bottles from my housewarming party for a year and a half before finally organising a box big enough to transport them to the recycling point.
In London, people take old glass bottles to their local deli to have them refilled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar or elderflower cordial. Superfluous glass bottles can be put in special recycling bags and left outside houses for collection by the normal rubbish truck.
Our broekies in a knot
In Germany, garbage inspectors rummage through people's trash to make sure that they're not mixing recyclables with other rubbish. Recycling isn't just good behaviour, it's the law.
Front page news covers debates about the relative carbon emissions of imported out-of-season goods and local goods that have been frozen to last the winter. Parenting magazines shout "Ensure your baby is carbon neutral from day one!"
Last generation's children pestered their parents about the evils of smoking. Today's children nag about environmental awareness. They're being told at school that if we don't modify our behaviour, the world is going to end.
And all the while, South Africans get their broekies in a knot about having to fork out a minimal fee for plastic bags because they never remember to put their own in the car, and the idea of reducing carbon emissions by using public transport is impractical beyond measure.
Georgina Guedes is a South African woman who quit her job to travel the world.
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