By Gianina Carla Marcelo
[Ecothon Stories Campaign]
Has anyone ever wondered why almost every person has been advocating for environmental “AWARENESS” but not for its advocacy education and literacy? It has always been about the shallow and superficial façade on level of awareness, but only a chosen few deliberately put action and follow through after with all the campaigning and lobbying.
You see, environmental awareness is in touch and congruence with Sustainable Consumption and Production. Living in the 21st century, pre-COVID-19 pandemic, citizens especially in Manila have been living fast-paced, working, and hustling the daily grind and are highly consumeristic in nature.
You wake up, eat the most important meal of the day, go to school or work, eat lunch, work again, then go home. This is the usual monotonous cycle of a commoner like me in a pre-pandemic state, without ever realizing into full detail how freshly harvested goods are even delivered into the grocery markets; only trivially problematizing what my next meal would be.
Food production, a vital and integral part to sustain a nation, has gone into the periphery. Unappreciated for its efforts on how a farmer tills the soil to produce a harvest, how a fisherman wakes before sunrise to catch a net full of fish, so on and so forth. Thanks to constant advertising, brand recognition has been smoothly inculcated into the minds of consumers in the urban city. With a click of a button, any item in the digital platform is sent by a courier at the foot of your doorstep.
Now that the COVID-19 Pandemic has come and challenged us to our core to be innovative and versatile to make a living, we were left with no recourse but to stay at home.
As a fresh college graduate, I am struggling to make ends meet. I have been trying to reconcile the dissonance of how my course would help my family stay afloat when most of my family members’ Collegiate courses were into Commerce. Feeling excluded and left out, I was opting to enter the business scene as well.
With having no monetary capital and feeling insecure about the instability of the economy and when our next meal will come in – granting having fulfilled all errands inside the household, yet feeling a bit hesitant with actually filing for a job application – there came a day that I stumbled upon the idea of recycling.
I took the corrugated carton, packed it with tape, and started collecting used plastic bottles my father brought from the grocery. In a span of a week the carton box was full, and eventually, another paper bag was needed to contain the used recyclables.
I was about to haggle with a nearby regulated and certified junkshop, but before doing so, I made sure each recyclable was clean from leachate. I searched and re-traced how much each item cost in the market before consumption. As it turns out, the whole week’s consumption amounted to approximately ₱ 2,202.00. If I were to contribute these recyclables to a junk shop now, 1% of this would amount to ₱22.02, the only amount I will receive in return.
This led me to think of the country’s standard of living and how it is affected by the ₱537.00 minimum wage. This led me to think of others if they have managed to survive 2 to 3 years’ loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic and if our common Filipino folks have enough for daily sustenance. This led me to think beyond myself, beyond my needs; but more importantly for the welfare of the society as a whole, and that we are not merely a country for human resources and production. We are much more than that and to limit our agency to mere consumers is inhumane and degrading.
So up until now, I am still yet to haggle in the junk shop for my recyclables to bargain for meager change. That’s just me at my lowest point and thinking “may pera nga sa basura”. I can push through with this advocacy for recyclables-exchange mechanism, and save all proceeds for the next big emergency – say pay an accumulated outstanding debt, as I finally decide how to join the workforce. But you’ll never know how one slip can make one as poor as a pauper.
The author of this article is Gianina Carla Marcelo, a Fresh Graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication, from St. Scholastica’s College, Manila.