Environmental campaign startarted in bathroom

By Kim Sun Ai, instructor on environment in Seoul YWCA

 

Shortage of water in India

I like traveling. I am addicted to it . Yes, that's more like it. It has been 10 years that I give lectures on the environment in various places including Seoul Y from spring to winter. When winter comes, I pick up my backpack and take off all of sudden. At the beginning of this year, I have been to India. India is the most populated country in the world. Its surface amounts to 33 times larger than South Korea, the 7th largest country in the world. Its size is immense to the point that I spent a whole month traveling only 9 cities of northern part of the country. Since electricity and water supply are insufficient, electricity is frequently cut without notice in the desert areas. Therefore, ordinary people like you cannot even dream of using hot water, which lead naturally to a problem of cleaning up on the part of traveler.

Toilet in India

On my arrival in India, the most embarrassing thing is a bathroom. In the bathroom, there is a faucet and a gourd next to a toilet bowl instead of toilet paper. Not knowing the situation in India, foreigners are said to clean up their body with the water in the gourd. In fact, the faucet and the gourd are equivalent to our toilet paper. You must have heard that Indian people use their right hand for eating and their left hand for toilet.

The habit of using a left hand to clean up with water in a gourd is practiced by all Indians regardless of their wealth, power and social status beyond the Caste. A gourd of water is enough to be a toilet.

 

Environmental burden caused by toilet paper

Naturally, we think that we should use toilet paper in the bathroom. With a bidet built in, electricity consuming habit in the bathroom is even considered as hygienic. How much toilet paper do you use? Have you ever give a thought on what kind of bathroom is eco-friendly? Is a bidet worth being plugged in all day long only for a couple of uses a day? Toilet paper is made of pulp from trees. A daily consumption of toilet paper worldwide takes as many as 27,000 trees. Besides the trees for toilet paper, the procedures of its production are a big burden to the environment, too. If India, the second populated in the world had a toilet practice like ours, the trees in the rain forest would be devastated already.

 

Environmental campaign started from trivial things

Indians, I believe, have been practising a nature-friendly way of cleaning up. Once during a safari in a desert, I saw white kleenex that had been thrown by Koreans rolling in a corner of the desert. Indians would not have left such a trail.

There are some toilet habits to save our Earth. Though unable to use water like Indians, we can use toilet paper less. The campaign on 'No Paper Towel for Hands' practised by Seoul Y is in the same context. Habits of using a handkerchief and consuming only a necessary amount of water and toilet paper are the things that can be put into action for the environment. Let's practise our love for the environment in our everyday life.

 

 

*With a view to spread love for the environment, Seoul Y introduces members' personal experience and develops the campaign on the environment.