Low waste practices every one can do as student
If this situation would not have arisen then our school would reopen and I would have a lovely time in my freshman year of high school. Today in this blog post I want to tell you about How you can have a low waste lifestyle while being in school or college. Last year when I came to know about this movement I was not able to reduce waste because there were a lot of things I want to pre-plan but this time when after this quarantine period will get over, I will be joining my school again. And hope that I will succeed in this activity. I am preparing for all the stuff from a lot of time and most of them are in place or the others I need to buy. my list is a long one and I want to share that all so that you may get an idea of how I want my things to work. In this blog post, I will categories everything and will try to explain what I used to do with that category, and now what I am planning to do with it (or else doing it). so let's get started...
BOOKS
With God's grace, I have elder siblings and at this time I am taking the help of them. You must be wondering how? Well, it is simple, taking their books. I study in India and here we are not allowed to take electronic gadgets to school and this actually cuts off the chances that you can have an ebook on your phone or laptop. So, this option seems to be the best, that is you need to borrow someone's book. Some people try to arrange books from the library and in my case, I am going to have books which are "hand me down" ones! truly I loved this idea of borrowing books because this reduces paper wastage and also cuts down the expenses which I can save for my essential oils and other things that I want to buy in the future. So, the only things I need to purchase after quarantine are some notebooks :) talking about what I do before borrowing books from my sisters (which for some books could not be done because we use to study in different schools from kindergarten) I use to buy all books and notebooks from my school (until fifth grade) or I use to buy them from book depot and I use to spend a whole two or three days covering them up from plastic wraps and pasting the name slips which usually ends up in my dustbin and I think anybody could guess what I was up to by seeing my trash jar. this time for wrapping my books with the help of scrap paper which I think is recycled paper.
STATIONERY
Talking about stationery, I am doing very well in it. For me, as you can see in the picture, I mainly use this stationery, and for annotating I am having some colorful pens and some highlighters, which I do not use much often but it depends on my mood. sometimes I use them for annotating but not much. Those which you see in that picture are my all-time used supplies for eg my fountain pens which I have both in black and in blue (one of them is not there. It is misplaced) in which I use to refill with the help of a piston so whenever I run out of ink I use to refill from the ink bottle (I use to do this work every morning so that I do not run out of ink in school) other essentials that I use are my mechanical pencil, my ruler and eraser. (These all came with plastic packaging but I will search for a better alternative in future when I will run out of these supplies). Before this kind of thing ever come up in my life I use to buy a new pen every month (it depends upon how much often I lost my pen) and I use to insert refills every time I run out of refills and in case of pencils I use to buy wooden pencils and no matter what happened to that I use to take one new one every month, same with erasers and rulers (rulers sometimes last more than pencil and erasers.) I regret this the most now but I think it is ok to make mistakes.
LUNCH
My lunch is actually not the worst part. in India, we do not have a dining system, but the waste we create from is the cafeteria. I know that different foods are really awesome and I even love to eat them but they are wrapped in either aluminum or plastic making it worse for the environment. I am not saying that I do not eat it. I am a big foodie too but we can minimize the waste generated by just minimizing this activity, try to eat less often than you are eating just as I do. trust me I did not drop this to zero but when I eat junk when I feel that I need to or when my dad uses to bring at home. talking about my lunch box, I am having two different lunch boxes one for oily food and others for sandwiches, burgers, etc. I am have been using them for more than three or four years ( I do not count it). talking about the cutlery, I always used to take my spoons and forks from the time I was in kindergarten. The last thing is the bottle which is one of the things I just changed this year. Now I have a stainless steel bottle which I use to take to school and will continue to use it until this will be broken ( I hope this will not happen soon.) in past I use to but a plastic bottle (not disposable one but it was made from thermosetting plastic) and often it falls from either my backpack or from my chair or I lose their caps. most of those bottles are still with me or been donated by my parents but yeah! I regret using that not much but a little. (it is ok to feel regret, everyone does and I too use to feel in that way too that it is ok now.)
BACKPACK
The backpack that I have this time is the Jansport Superbreak bag pack that I love to have in my school life. to be exact that bag arrived on 6 June 2019 (how can I not remember, I insisted the most for that) the reason why I bought it is that first, it is good and the second is because it has a lifetime guarantee. That means whenever I need it to will be damaged I will send for the repair to their center and they will give me back that same bag if they fix the damage otherwise they will send a new one to me so no problem. Before that, I used to buy a bag once every 2 years, and then it is kept idle or for donation ( It is up to my Mumma). In this process, we were not wasting any resources but had to change the bag after a certain period of time. That is why I just bought JanSport's backpack. you can also do something like this. You can buy a bag like this or else if you do not want to do it just keep donating to those who you think needs the most.
ORGANIZERS
for my bookshelf, I do not use any such organizers but I use some cardboard boxes for that and I am planning to buy two organizers but these are on my list from which I will buy afterward. For my desk, I am using a cardboard sort of tray that we got from the packaging. I painted it and it is on my desk holding very different items. For my paper organizers, I am currently using a plastic binder that I bought last year and some files that I got with report cards when I was small. I have plenty of them so I can use it instead of buying a new one. I might suggest if you do not have binders or paper files currently and you are looking forward to buying one such to buy an aluminum or cardboard one. These can be expensive though but it will be durable.
CONCLUSION
With this, I want to tell you there are many steps you can take as individuals. we can be a better person of ourselves and can save this beautiful environment. There are other ways too through which you can save this environment from getting worse. If you want content listing only the ways on how you can spend a low waste student life comment me in the comment section or inform me through my social media accounts which you may find on the home page. I hope you understand what I mentioned in my post and now it is your turn to show the results.
Now, I will meet you next Monday with another blog post. so, until then goodbye.