Environmentally Friendly

#727 | Posted Wednesday 12th December 2007 at 12:43pm by Andi Smith

I'm all for going green and helping the environment, but the latest 'save the environment' news is just bordering on the ridiculous. We seem to have gone from a country of environment abusers to tip toeing around everything to avoid upsetting the arctic. It's inevitable that we're going to produce some kind of waste, and I don't see why all of a sudden our whole way of life needs to be sacrificed.

Don't get me wrong - I happily recycle glass bottles, paper and cans wherever I can. But I can do these things as part of my daily schedule. I'm not having to change my life (too much) to do these things. Now it seems the environmentalists are after the other parts of my life.

The latest is this - BBC News reports that this Christmas "the UK's love of the traditional turkey dinner will generate 51,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide." So we're now meant to stop having Christmas dinner?

How about fixing some of the other environment issues that plague our world. Like, exactly how many free newspapers does one person need? In London, free newspapers are now as common as Starbucks, they have sprung up from all over the place in the last two years and are completely funded by advertising.

We have the Metro, the London Lite, The London Paper and City AM as free daily newspapers; and a whole host of free magazines such as Sport, Careers Weekly etc. Why exactly do we need that many? Does news really change that much from account to account?

And the free papers seem to employ people who don't really seem to know a lot of English to distribute them -and by 'distribute' I mean try and force you to have at least one copy of each every day and by 'who don't seem to know a lot of English' I mean they don't take 'no' for an answer.

Personally, I use the Internet. It's paperless and provides all the news I could ever need right down to a specialist subject, and by the very fact you're reading this probably suggest you also read some of your news on the Internet.

Now I understand that people like to have something to read on their train home every day, but one paper is sufficient. And if they want to waste the environment and a tree or two, why not have them pay for this paper?

We can try and protect the environment all we want, but until the greedy corporations stop trying to ram newspapers down my throat, there's no way I'm even considering changing a tradition like Christmas dinner.

3 comments - last by Duncan | Bookmark this!

Comments

dad

#1 | Wednesday 12th December 2007 at 05:34pm

You have hit it on the head son our turkey dinner is going to produce loads of carbon emissions ok so i wont eat turkey for dinner i will just eat my chicken beast is that going to make it any better i do not think so we all will eat that day so be it chicken corma or toad in the hole it will produce the same carbon