Mission Green – South India

The Mission Green team self-funded a mission to clean up a slum area in Marikavalsa, Vizag, South India, on 20th January 2018. We were happy to work with a small church and some volunteers from the area itself. Our aim was not only to clean up the plastic from the dirty streets but also educate the locals about the importance of recycling and how best to manage their waste. Every day in Vizag 100 Tonnes of unsegregated waste per day is diverted to Marikavalsa’s 100 acres (and still growing) waste site. It is here that countless unsorted mixed waste piles are set on fire 365 days a year, 24hrs a day causing many deadly health problems including breathing problems and eyesight loss for those in surrounding areas, according to CVR News (2017). We visited the site itself prior to our mission, and saw the atrocious way in which waste is managed and saw and smelt the deadly smoke for ourselves and understood the dire need to educate the surrounding areas on how to segregate waste and reduce their plastic use. It is a very small drop in the ocean, but it has fuelled our passion in cleaning up areas with poor education, we are all on one world and need to work together for the good of everyone on it.

Our future aims are to educate schools and colleges in India and other developing countries on how to manage and reduce waste.

Footprints are a mark of where you have been, but ones that you can see are not the only ways to tell where you have left a mark. You leave an invisible footprint with most everything that you do. So if it is invisible, how do we know what mark we leave? It is a car-bon footprint that is the measurement of how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are released by our actions. So why is this fact important to know? This is an important question for us to wonder about and find an answer to.

Carbon footprint calculations

There are several carbon footprint calculators available on the web. I like the one offered by an English company, Carbon Footprint Ltd. (www.carbonfootprint.com), because it is detailed yet divides contributions into logical categories and because it allows students to create and store different scenarios. The calculator uses the methodology outlined in the British government’s guidelines for mandatory measuring and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions (Department for Environment, Food and

Firms responsibility

1) How do firms adjust the supplier selection process when sustainability is a key consideration? and

2) What factors affect the transfer of sustainability skills between the manufacturer and its suppliers?

Addressing Climate Change

We are still in the very early stages of addressing this problem, and most of us are still confused as to how to react, at either a private or public level; but a range of measures have been suggested – some of them extreme, such as tinkering with the composition of the Earth’s biosphere or making air travel, and air freight, prohibitively only seasonally available products. Disengaging ourselves from both mass tourism and the consumption of exotic or locally out-of-season food will be no easy task; the West is seriously addicted to both, which are now firmly engrained into our lifestyle, for all the feelings of guilt they can induce in many of us on occasion. It may be a pleasant experience to have products like asparagus and strawberries on our tables in December and January in northern Europe, but they come at a carbon cost that has to be acknowledged; baby vegetables are emission-loaded.

Carbon Truth

If we are to survive in something recognizably like our current form, then it will also be absolutely necessary for governments to be truthful about the carbon emission situation – and for there to be means of checking that they are doing so, ideally by some supranational body such as the EU or the UN. The IPCC should be given more power to insist on targets being met and procedures to monitor those targets; following their recommendations should not be left to national whim, nor to the devious tricks that governments are only too capable of playing with data. There is a very real danger that governments, as is their wont with future elections in mind, will tell the public whatever it is that casts them in a good light, and from now on that is going to mean recording reductions in national carbon emission totals – as a result of government policy and efficiency, we shall of course be told. For those who have signed up for Kyoto this would seem to be a test of their political credibility, but governments can be very creative with it.

Statistics can be manipulated to political advantage, therefore, and a recent event in the UK provides yet another instructive example of why we have to be on our guard. In spring 2008 the British press reported that the country’s National Audit Office was challenging the government’s figures that the UK had achieved a 16.4 per cent cut in carbon emissions since 1990. According to the government the country had released 656 tonnes of CO2into the atmosphere in 2005, but it transpired that there were in fact two official sets of records being kept on carbon emissions, and that the other one, from the Office of National Statistics, showed a significantly higher total of 733 tonnes released that year.

Reducing Carbon footprint

How great an impact the latter would have on the footprint at large is debatable – which is not an argument for discontinuing the practice, as every little helps, especially if it promotes an increased awareness of what is at stake, as it seems to be doing. What would be really significant, however, is a change in our use of transport. If we could manage to cut down dramatically on car use and air and sea travel – the latter is now thought to be responsible for twice as many emissions as air travel, overturning earlier notions as to its relative cleanness – there would be a large reduction in our footprint. But that would require a principled rejection of personal car travel and overseas tourism by individuals that would be hard to engineer – never mind to monitor on a systematic basis. The arguments for and against such a rejection, where self-interest comes into open collision with the public good (differends in action yet again), will now be analysed, as will the validity of the radical ecological call for a lower globa

By Nick Hunter. 32 pp. Gareth Stevens Publishing. New York. 2014. ISBN: 9781433995521.

Mission Green 2017 All rights reserved