‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’
ROBERT Pickersgill, minister of water, land, environment and climate change, has reiterated that parents and educators need to teach the younger generation the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling.
According to the minister, who was speaking at the 2013 Hope Zoo Earth Day & Fun Day in Kingston yesterday, Jamaica is at a crossroads where our children need to be fully educated on the benefits, advantages and disadvantages of preserving our environment.
“I want to make sure that we always have clean air, clean water and clean land, but we all have to work together to make that happen. Protecting our environment is about protecting where we live and being careful about how we live,” Minister Pickersgill said during a rap and story session with over 300 students, parents and educators.
“To reduce the amount of garbage we make, we need to reduce, reuse and recycle. Reducing means cutting down the amount of garbage that we make; reusing means using something again before putting it in the garbage and recycling means taking things that we have finished using and make them into brand new things,” he further stated.
Pickersgill also shared useful tips and explained to students that at least 20 years from now they would be the beneficiaries of the positive environmental acts they do today.
“Use grass cuttings, plant cuttings and food skins from the kitchen to make compost rather than throwing them away. Use yam skin, banana peels, corn husks, and other things which came from the earth and are organic material. Burning garbage is bad for you and the environment. It pollutes the air and air pollution can make you sick,” Pickersgill said.
In an interview with Environment Watch following his presentation, he said the Earth Day initiative hosted by Hope Zoo was a well-timed initiative which targets students between the ages of 6 and 12 years, who account for the most unaware groups when it comes to preservation methods.
“To have the young ones here between an age range of 6 to 12 to celebrate Earth Day is something that really cannot be quantified in monetary terms,” Pickersgill said.
“I was very happy and privileged to be here to speak with the young children, and I was pleasantly surprised that some of them are in tuned with the vocabulary regarding the environment and climate change,” he added.
He added that Jamaicans should make more effort in sharing in the offerings of Hope Gardens and Zoo as the restructuring efforts being undertaken now is of great recreational value to our society.
At the end of the 2013 Earth Hope Zoo Earth Day celebration, each child was given a fruit tree which Pickersgill instructed them to plant, water daily and protect, as it is their positive contribution to the preservation of our environment.