Takeaway food is more popular than ever. Many of the cafes and restaurants now offer a takeout option for meals and drinks, and we can see a prominent increasing trend. This increase brings to our world the easy availability of plastic food containers and disposable cutlery.
While the plastic food containers are ‘big’ enough in size to catch our attention, those small bits of plastic cutlery and other utensils are, in fact, making a huge volume of our waste, and lead to the worsening of plastic pollution. Are you ready to count how many single-use forks, knives, spoons, stirrers, and straws come to your hands when you order your takeaway meals?
Many people are looking for eco-friendly alternatives to disposable items. Some prefer using their reusable options – ‘bring your own’ cutlery. It doesn’t have to be a special set – it can be something from the kitchen and then wrapped in a cloth or a pouch. For those who are looking for some handy and lightweight options, reusable bamboo cutlery can be a choice. The Campus Sustainability Office has recently introduced a reusable bamboo cutlery set to the campus GreenCoin users. Registered GreenCoin users can redeem this fashionable cutlery set with their ‘Coins’, which are the virtual credits that they keep with their GreenCoin mobile app. This cutlery set comes with a fork, a spoon, and a pair of chopsticks, and is packed in a canvas pouch in green or khaki. It is an attractive incentive to current campus GreenCoin users, and it matches well with the University’s direction to encourage more students and staff to kick their plastic habits. With their green actions to ditch plastics, they can enrol for the GreenCoin campaign and earn virtual credits that can be used to redeem eco-friendly items to make their life greener.
Packing a set of reusable cutlery to take with us isn’t something very difficult to manage. If you are already carrying a reusable water bottle or coffee cup when you leave the house, why not bring your own cutlery kit as well? We can avoid using plastic utensils with a little effort. After all, this can be a way we could reduce our environmental impact without it significantly affecting our life. It’s worth doing.
