Focus
Campaigner tries to save planet one receipt at a time
By Meng Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-30 07:53
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Wen Hengfeng, a full-time garbage campaigner at the Global Village Beijing, always spends her weekends encouraging garbage sorting and recycling in residential districts. Provided to China Daily |
Wen Hengfeng never buys her 8-year-old daughter battery toys; because she believes batteries are hazardous in landfills.
She never orders takeaway because she regards using disposal food containers as harmful to the environment.
She seldom has weekends for herself or her family because she uses the time to promote garbage sorting and recycling in residential districts.
Wen is a full-time garbage campaigner at the Global Village Beijing, the first nongovernmental organization in the city promoting garbage sorting.
She would have been an accountant or a stay-at-home mother if she hadn't read an article about garbage sorting in 1998.
After more than a decade, she has forgotten what the article exactly said, but she remembers it was the first time she heard about garbage sorting and that she agreed with it immediately. She soon became a part-time volunteer.
In 2007 she officially joined Global Village and decided to advocate sorting to others.
Asked about how she sorts and recycles her garbage at home, this relatively shy woman becomes animated.
"Some people may think food packaging such as yogurt containers, or small things such as supermarket receipts, cannot be recycled. They're wrong. I clean and organize all this stuff and send it to garbage collectors for free. They will accept them happily. In fact most of my family waste can be recycled," she said.
According to her husband, she actually separates garbage into two kinds: that which must be thrown away, such as kitchen waste, and that which shouldn't.
"She is indeed a garbage collector. She has already turned our home into a rubbish dump. She can hardly throw away anything," Wen's husband said jokingly.
Wen admitted that she finds it difficult to throw things away because she sees everything as a potential resource. "I even keep threads from those bags used to contain flour and reuse them to sew clothes," she said.
Apart from the difficulty she has in throwing things away, buying new things is also difficult for Wen, who said it is a basic truth that if people reduce what they buy, it will reduce the amount of garbage produced.
Though, she has successfully converted her family to sorting garbage, she said many residents still don't see the benefit.
"Some say it's meaningless to make any effort sorting garbage because refuse collectors mix the sorted rubbish together before taking it away, or that the majority haven't take action, so it is useless for them to act first," she said.
But Wen urges people to stop finding excuses for their laziness. "It is meaningless to blame the government for not providing the opportunity to recycle. It is even worse to say: 'no one else does that, so why should I?' The only thing that matters here is to ask yourself: what can I do, what am I doing and what have I done," she said.
She recalls a garbage sorting promotion in December 2009 when a man stood up and said: "If we want to keep our lifestyles then we have to consume and destroy the environment to some degree. It's just a matter of time before we destroy the whole planet, what's the point of recycling and why should we feel guilty?"
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"If it begins from guilt then you will soon feel proud that you recycled one plastic bottle or used fewer disposal chopsticks. Even the smallest actions can help save the planet," she said.
Wen emphasized at the end of the interview that she doesn't like being labeled as an environmentalist.
"I'm simply a Beijing resident. What I do is what I think every ordinary Beijing citizen should do."
