The Day of No Rubbish Bins

It was Climate Action Day at NUS yesterday. This year, it’s also more commonly known as the Day of No Rubbish Bins. That’s because the organizers, for the strangest and most inane reasons, felt that rubbish bins have something to do with climate. The action this year was to remove all (or most) rubbish bins around campus, and this is supposed to create awareness about our climate and environment.

Yeah, right. It is working, because we’re now all so indignant about the lack of rubbish bins and the stupidity of such action, which has prompted us to find out who is behind this.

The organizers want us to generate no waste on this day. Hello, how do you generate no waste? Our human body functions naturally generate waste. Waste happens everywhere. How do you make waste not happen at all?

So, I understand that one of the ideas is, for example, to bring your own lunch boxes instead of requesting takeaway carriers. So when you’re done with lunch, what do you do with the lunch boxes? Don’t you need to wash them? Don’t you need some washing detergent to make them clean and hygienic? So where does the water and detergent go after washing?

If you remove rubbish bins everywhere, where is everyone going to put their rubbish? Do you seriously expect that every single last person who would have used those rubbish bins will dutifully find a proper way to dispose of their waste? I think, littering will go up! So now our cleaners have to do more work cleaning up. Maybe, using more water in the process. Is this what Climate Action Day is about?

That’s not to mention all the wasted manpower involved in removing the rubbish bins at the start of the day, and then reinstating them at the end of the day.

What in the world are they thinking? This is really so dumb.

This is about as silly as the Earth Hour events happening on campus. At NUS, Earth Hour means a whole bunch of people coming back to campus, which is on a Saturday night where no one (or at least most people) would be working on campus anyway, to turn off the lights, waste one hour of precious time, then turning back on the lights. Think about not just wasted time, but also transportation and carbon emissions generated from an unnecessary trip to work.

But perhaps this Climate Action Day did achieve its awareness goal. At least for me. Right intentions. Totally failed execution.

Here’s my contribution to Climate Action Day. Check out the Story of Stuff’s original video that was released two years ago.