Do not ignore the signs!

Earth — not only my, your, their home, but our. I feel musty to mention one of my favorite quotes:

“Nature provides us things free of cost to satisfy our needs… For our greed; it provides, but with a price now. Now that’s something to be worried for.”

Genuinely, I truly believe that most of you acknowledged what is a real meaning behind the price of Nature is paying. It is the price of 43 billion tons of CO2, pollution of 8 million metric tons of oceans, 1 million dead marine animals, 300 million tonnes of plastic waste and-so-forth, each year.

There is now 5.25 trillion macro and micro pieces of plastic in our ocean & 46,000 pieces in every square mile of ocean, weighing up to 269,000 tonnes. Every day around 8 million pieces of plastic makes their way into our oceans.

Different from my other articles on topic of “Plastic waste” , on this post I would like to touch to other aspects of it.

As we all are aware of the fact that, thanks to technological advances, not only some, but most of us are encountering with posts, articles, images and etc. about the issues of pollution on a daily basis. I truly believe that we are not only reading, but also putting effort to change our habits and having at least some contribution to save our planet.

For my opinion, the main reason of usage of plastic items not only related with our behaviors, but also within the economic perspective of suppliers. According to the basic idea of economy, most of us are familiar with the term of “ Supply and Demand”. In a broader sense, Supply and demand is a relationship between the quantity of a commodity that producers wish to sell at various prices and the quantity that consumers wish to buy. So it means that when there is a high demand for the product and services, suppliers can drive the markets by satisfying these needs and gaining profit. Additionally, we shouldn’t forget the fact that customers are tend to purchase the products and services which are less costly compared to others.

Hereby, if we look at the market prices statistically, we can easily notice that the price of any commodity with an eco-friendly tag to it is thrice the price of its regular counterpart.

Let me give you another example aside the pollution issues.

According to the CDC National Center for Health Statistics, from 1999–2000 through 2017–2018, the prevalence of obesity increased from 30.5% to 42.4%, and the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%. That one of the cause is mentioned as the socioeconomic status of the individuals. Overall, men and women with college degrees had lower obesity prevalence compared with those with less education. Along with it, when we compare the prices of fast food market within the prices of healthy food, we can see a huge gap between them. In presence, I noticed it as well while I realized that most of the people who would like pursue healthy life style cannot do it not because they are not willing to but because of the economy that victimizes them.

There is one book that is talking about the structure of the economy and how it drives the lives of individuals, one line got my attention:

“ The world would be way more nice place as an example, if the doctors would get profit during the time they could ensure the health of patient continuously, not in the times when they would get sick. In this way, the whole mechanism would work in a different way, more people would be healthy and more doctors would be attain to the jobs.”

It is about most of the things in societies are revolving around money, profits and less around moral issues, such as health, development, maintaining sustainable environment.

Very brief in statement of expression, if we want to pursue an eco-friendly life style, and take care of our care giver, we should work as a whole system not as individuals which will make everybody to acquire habits by the help of the society.

Some organizations are trying to maintain their businesses by offering diverse type of products, that including the ones which have devastated effects on our planet. In fact, one of the example is a pre-peeled orange sold in a plastic container. That the continuous tweets of people could bring awareness and put a stop to the sale of it in the grocery chain stores.

Luckily, increasingly dubbed “Generation Green,” millennials and Gen Z demonstrate environmentally and socially-conscious consumer behavior.

Designed in collaboration with a range of partners including CVS Health, IKEA, PepsiCo, Visa and WWF International, this study surveyed 27,000 people across 27 markets to explore their sentiment around healthier, sustainable lifestyles. One takeaway from the research is that globally, younger generations are more likely to feel ashamed (“very often” or “often”) about living lifestyles that are unhealthy and are not environmentally friendly, compared to their older peers.

The main concern here is why eco-friendly society should spend high amount of money on products in order to save our planet, but why not the economic structure should be changed to better in order to ease this effort for every individual?

For the time being, with the assistance of many associations that fight for providing society within eco-friendly items, day by day, the awareness of individuals are also gradually increasing.

Not least of all, “ Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean”.

Working together is a success.