CONNECTING WASTE TO WEALTH AND CLIMATE CHANGE.
Waste management isn’t just about cleaning up streets; it is a critical pillar of climate action and a massive engine for the green economy.
As an advocate of climate change, I always look out for ways to conserve, preserve and protect my environment. In same vein, I urged everyone present to cultivate environmental sustainability habits. For the sake of time, I touched on just a few of such habits.
1: Buy what you can consume, this helps to reduce organic waste. Many people do not know that poorly managed organic waste generates methane, a greenhouse gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.
2: Avoid littering, when you litter you alter the ecosystem. Some plastic materials take decades to decay and some may never decay. Littering also result in flash floods. When you litter and it rains the rain water that is supposed to flow freely through gutters and drainages is obstructed thereby resulting to flooding.
3: Embrace and adopt renewable energy: It can no longer be overemphasized that the use of Renewable energy helps in the reduction of carbon emission.
4: Cut down on the use of personal vehicles to mitigate carbon emission (share rides when you can, patronize public transport).
On a daily basis, we should educate peers, family, members, and friends about reducing waste and recycling.
We should let them know that, In waste management, there is the Traditional waste management which teaches us to dispose of what we do not use anymore(waste)while the new waste management otherwise known as green or circular economy teaches us that there is no such thing as waste. We are thought to view waste as resource in the wrong place and form unlike the old traditional linear economy.
I commended the Waste Management Board for launching this Academy.
I also called on the private sector, civil society, and tech innovators in Edo to partner with the newly flagged-off Academy to scale green solutions, Collins Tenebe said.