Dubai
I personally enjoy reading the newspaper every day before school. The variety of articles published opens one’s eyes to a complex world. To me, reading the newspaper is more satisfying than reading news online.
Almost every home subscribes to a daily delivery service for newspapers. Each day’s paper roughly weighs a kilogramme, with all the classifieds and leaflets. This amounts is close to 365kg of newsprint each year per family. If the daily circulation reaches over a 100,000 in the UAE, we can imagine roughly how many trees are needed to produce the pulp needed.
According to the US-based University of Colorado’s Environment Centre, recycling a four-foot stack of newspapers saves the equivalent of one 40-foot fir tree. And recycling all of your home’s waste newsprint, cardboard, glass, and metal can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 386kg a year.
One thing that bothers me is how we continue to enjoy reading the newspaper without the guilt of wasting natural resources and cutting down trees. Fortunately, one does not have to choose between reading a newspaper and being eco-conscious.
Being an active student member of the Emirates Environment Group (EEG), I have regularly contributed to collecting newspapers from neighbours and depositing them at the EEG, to be recycled. This needs commitment and persistence and has the advantage of recycling large quantities of paper.
I was thinking of alternate ways to give a new life to them, too. Gradually, I started experimenting with ways to reuse them at home. I used old newspapers, flyers at my doorstep, giftwrapping paper, packaging material and papier-mâché to make gifts for friends and families on special occasions.
With some patience, I realised that paper can be treated in myriad ways. It can be folded, twisted, beaded, plaited, woven, turned into a collage, rolled and quilled and lends itself to innumerable creations. Various objects of interest can be crafted with a creative idea. I bought a few books to develop my skills further. Taking tips from these, I have created gift box decorations, bookmarks, masks, candle holders, key chains, fancy jewellery and name plaques.
Recycled paper can be used as an endless range of gifts. These are inexpensive and look very good. From time to time, I also teach a few tips to family friends and young children in my neighbourhood. This has helped them create things they can be proud of. Many of them have shared how they use these ideas to improve school projects. They have stopped buying stickers and stamps to make their projects colourful and learnt to use handmade paper trinkets instead.
Streamers for birthdays can be replaced with a string of origami paper lanterns and personalised message cards. For festive occasions, I have tried paper and card decorations without dyes and colours that generally stain. These motifs can be rearranged to create different patterns and be moved around easily, too.
Vacation period is the best time for children to try their hand at something new. Many parents complain about how to keep them engaged. I once engaged such a group of young students to create dioramas with waste paper, used paper cups and pizza boxes. Together, we put our projects for display and invited our parents, who were amazed at the outcome.
I believe that each of us, with a little thought, can be an eco-warrior in a small way.
— The reader is a student based in Dubai.
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