Save What You Can, Where you Can, When you Can!!

A picture speaks a thousand words, doesn’t it? Well, if not, I’ll keep shouting from the rooftop till the cows come home. These are the ‘leftovers’ from each category of school paraphernalia that have been rendered fit for dumping by my brats, and I have determinedly decided to do something about them.

I have (not-so-) happily spent the entire vacation raiding cupboards, rummaging chests of drawers, checking out every single pouch/ box, scrutinising every used/ semi-/ unused notebook, crayon, pencil, pen, erasers etc. of each of my two kids. It started from feeling irritable & annoyed to eventually feeling concerned and hapless as the gravity of the situation gradually sunk in.

The amount of stationery and school paraphernalia in semi/ un- used condition our kids declare ‘useless’ with every ‘new academic session’ is unbelievable. Since early childhood to now, I have been fairly judicious in the exhaustive utilization of commodities. Utilising a pencil till it could be hand-held or renewing the refill in that ball-point pen, making sure BOTH sides of a paper were FULLY utilised are the things that came naturally to me. When I say ‘me’, it somewhere applies to many/ most of my like-aged friends and cousins. And if ‘WE’ weren’t these environment-conscious, judicious individuals, we had our Parents to the needful! The 3 Rs of Remind, Reprimand and finally Rap existed back then, that too in their own glory.

Cutting back to today, I believe various factors like flourishing careers, dual income, lesser responsibilities, inheritance, smarter financial planning etc. have led to more affluent lifestyle for this generation. Nuclear families, lesser children and the perpetual guilt of working parents, have led to mollycoddled kids who are seldom questioned about the genuineness of their demand and usage of things. That they can ‘AFFORD’ to let the seemingly used stuff go to the dogs is the belief of parents and children alike. But, here is the thing: it is less about what you as a unit can afford to use/ waste, but more about what we as a world can/ can’t when it comes to the dwindling resources.

Of The 3 Rs of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle that we have been advocating to our kids at school and home, only the former 2 seem to make realistic sense. The amount of power/ energy and mechanical/ man efforts it takes to recycle things make it a cumbersome and financially unviable option. The natural decomposition of paper/ plastic/ metal/ stuff created from them takes aeons, as does the formation of natural resources, so the key is to reduce the consumption of the same.

Try to reuse what you can, and if you still can’t or don’t want to, please clean & organise them and pass them on to your domestic help/ drivers and/ or NGOs who will happily do the needful. There are takers for most of the things that maybe redundant to us. It is a humongous task to sort and recycle them to be able to use them all over again, so why not take the easier path of sharing and donating?

Folks, I urge us all, as adults who can foresee and as parents who should be concerned about what we are/ aren’t leaving behind for our children, to follow the following:

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•         The toughest: Shop lesser!! Whether its notebooks/ stationery/ craft items etc, if they don’t need it, don’t buy it. Saying NO is as much a part of good parenting as are others you already know of.
• ·      Go digital: save that paper, pencil lead, eraser, pen-ink whenever it can be. Insist on and practice the usage of soft copies wherever you can. Insist on schools to go digital through the PTA channel.
• ·      Try to exhaust totally what can be, to the extent it can be.
• ·      Use that erroneously printed paper on the other side for your To-Do list or Grocery items list.
• ·      Last but not the least, and also my strong personal belief, Practice what you Preach. Children are a reflection of our moving selves. You can Reiterate only if you follow.

 Give them lesser today, so they have adequate left for tomorrow. How and what will they buy, when there is nothing available to?

P.S.:- The scope and expanse of this piece is restricted/ limited to the material consumed by school going children. It is indeed a subset of the bigger (the biggest rather) issue of the receding resources and their management, concerning mankind on this planet today.