by Greta Romualdi, 11 years old (Siena, Italy)
Well, in this moment, in this place and in our world, we are humans which have a colossal responsibility. If we have been made to have this responsibility, we should respect it. In my case I have been lucky because I was brought up in a family that always respected this. What you are asking yourself is what is it? I am going to answer you by saying that it is recycling. I want to be able to explain what we humans did and are doing to take action about this case.
Most of the people in our world are aware of recycling but not all know how to take part in helping to do it. You might think that ancient civilisations did not recycle. I will tell you that you are wrong because people in the past recycled loads of things and materials but differently from the ones we do now.
A conference at the University of Tel Aviv compared forty experts of all around the world. This lifestyle was born more than a million years ago and actually started only seven hundred thousand years later. Homo Erectus and Neanderthal thought in green before anything. From old and broken tools or useless one they built new tools saving time and energy.
In today’s world, humans created a lot of disasters and now just putting something in the right bin is not enough. We have to “think outside the box” and use our technology to create machines that can change the world. Thanks to genius minds like the one of Boyan Slat and Akinori Ito we can think that there is still a chance to save our balance on planet Earth. Bring back the degree of entropy between us and the world. Akinori Ito is a Japanese man that works for the Blest Corporation. By using Japanese technology, he invented a machine that can help the environment, reduce the amount of garbage. It heats plastic at very high temperature and with the help of tap water it converts it back into oil. If you continue this process the oil can be used to make gasoline, diesel and kerosene. If you separate the oil then you can use it for a car, motorbike, generator, boiler and a stove. From 1kg of plastic you can make 1 litre of oil.
Once there was the Stone Age, then there was the Bronze Age and now we are in the middle of the Plastic Age. Every year we produce three hundred million tons of plastic, a fraction of that goes into rivers, lakes and eventually in the ocean. That is why Boyan Slat, one of the youngest students of environmental issues, invented the Ocean Clean-up. With his invention we managed to trap plastic in a part of the ocean and clean it. If we used it everywhere we would be able to clean the whole sea world. People like these young men helped a lot but that is not enough to make the Earth without any source of pollution and waste.
Also the Company of Coca Cola took action in recycling. Everybody remembers the 96-year-old glass bottle of Coke. Those bottles arrived at having more than one life because they were reused over and over. After a while, they could not be used anymore so Nendo Design Group of Tokyo decided to use them by renewing their shape. They chopped off the bottom and other different pieces to create recycled bowls, dishes and lots of other useful things.
In my 11-year-old experience in the countryside it is much easier to recycle. I live in the countryside of Siena a small town in the Tuscan hills. The food that me and my family do not eat, we give to our chickens and hens. We never waste things because we are aware of the problem of wasting. There are two things that I am very passionate about. The first one is horse riding, but the second one is to make the new generations – especially young kids – aware of the problems like global warming and wasting. Remember, it only takes a small amount of time and care to change the world. We, teenagers have to follow the good examples of the people like Boyan Slat and Akinori Ito, and we have to stop and think that every thing we produce, everything that we cannot recycle and leave behind us will be unbreakable. We will have to limit our habit of wasting. Humans have to come back at loving and respecting the world that hosts us. We have to maintain the world in good conditions and do not ruin it because it is our future. Like the winner of Sanremo2017 Gabbani in his song (Occidentali’s Karma) “…comunque vada panta rei and singing in the rain..”.
You have to remember that there is a cycle to recycling which, is reduce-reuse-recycle. I like to remember them as the “three Rs”. They all make part of taking action to save the Earth. I think of recycling a little bit like the game of Jenga, when you pull the correct block the tower stays intact and then you did something to help but when you pick the wrong block everything topples and you suffocated the Earth.