Always come across with “3R” but not really understand?
Don’t worry, here is some information for you. “3R” stands for reduce, reuse and recycle. They are always associated with the “Go Green Campaign”.
Reduce, in other word, waste minimization is the process and the policy of reducing the amount of waste produced by a person or a society. Please take a look on ourselves. Everyday, in the college, we use polystyrene dish to buy food, and polystyrene packing, which is also known as “white coffins” to pack our food. After that, when we go back to our room, we can see a lot of “white coffins” be dumped in the rubbish bins outside the toilet, and make the bins a small hill.
Actually, “reduce” can be started from our own. For the first year students, you were provided a lunch box and a small bottle after the “Perjumpaan dengan Ayahanda”. For others, you can buy a tupperware. We can make use of this tupperware every time we go to cafeteria. We can buy and pack the food into the tupperware. This action will reduce the rubbish in our college, saves environment, as well as saving ourselves from being attacked by the toxic. For your information, polystyrene cannot be recycled, it would not varnish from this earth since it was produced, till the end of the world. Furthermore, the polystyrene packing is not good for our health as it would release toxic when it is burnt.
Reuse is to use an item or items more than once. This, includes conventional reuse where the item is used again for the same function, and new-life reuse where it is used for a new function. There are some advantages of “reduce”, this would include reducing disposal needs and costs as well as energy and raw materials savings.
For instance, we use a lot of paper everyday. Actually, if you notice the way you use the paper, you can actually sort out a way to reuse the paper. Many of us always use a blank paper with only one side to print documents or writing. In fact, we can make full use of the paper, as using it both sides (front and back). If you misprint some documents with which the other side of paper is blank, you can always use it to make notes, draft, and prepare memos. This would save a lot of paper.
Recycling involves processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials, reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reduce energy usage, reduce air pollution (from incineration) and water pollution (from landfilling) by reducing the need for "conventional" waste disposal, and lower greenhouse gas emissions as compared to virgin production. Recyclable materials include many kinds of glass, paper, metal, plastic, textiles, and electronics.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) states on its website that “a paper mill uses 40 percent less energy to make paper from recycled paper than it does to make paper from fresh lumber.” From this statement, we can actually find out that recycling save a lot of energy and subsequently reduce the pollution to the earth.
In fact, “3R” is around us everyday, just we do not catch it and let it fly away. “3R” is not a difficult for us, as a student of university. We should be mature enough to think about how perish is our mother earth now. Surely, we do not want to see that the earth is getting not conducive for human to live in. Hence, from today onwards, try to make “3R” a principle of your life.
Members of Edisi Khas 12th '09
Author : Ng Jia Hao
Editor : Nadiah
Designer : Norsakinah
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