Issue 14

How hard is it to be environmentally conscious for a day? Laura Dannen tries cold showers, recycling and ‘letting what’s yellow mellow’ – not to mention carrying her rubbish around for 12 hours…

7.46am Crap. I left the air-con on all night – NOT a good way to start my day of energy conservation and planet-saving. I should have just used my standing fan…which is also running. I probably just used enough energy to power Guam. I wander into the bathroom, dreading my first green objective: take a two-minute shower – cold, not hot – and turn it on and off when soaping up to save water. Large parts of the world do this, so it should be easy in tropical Singapore, right? The first blast of water hits my body…annnnd that’s enough of that. I do manage to brush my teeth in the shower, though; this also helps save water, plus it feels incredibly liberating to spit (now who said you can’t spit in Singapore?) on the bathroom floor.

8.02am Skip the hairdryer and head for the closet. Now, what should a green champion wear? I avoid any leather (save the animals), and settle for what I consider my ‘hippy outfit’ – all cotton and earth tones. I also start my personal rubbish bag – a bright orange, clear plastic bag I’ll be carrying around all day to remind myself of all the waste I’m producing. No, not that kind of waste…just things I would normally chuck without a second thought. So far, all it holds is a clump of tissues, a by-product of my cold, but those are going to add up. Spray some perfume. More perfume. After all, I am carrying a bag of junk around all day.

8.26am Out the door, but not without turning off the power cord to the mobile phone charger, lamp and fan. No reason to leave that on while I’m gone, since I’m not using any of them. Ah, public transportation. I make my half-hour commute from Serangoon to Chinatown on the MRT every day anyway, but it’s never pretty. Rush-hour trains are packed, uncomfortably so, but for the price, regularity of the trains and to avoid putting more cars on the road (and CO2 in the air), it’s worth it. Once the Circle Line is done, hopefully the congestion will get better. Hopefully.

9.07am Into the office, where my green assault really begins. I told my co-workers they would have to go green today too, for the sake of the story; they asked me if we would have to work in the park across the street to stay out of air-con. Funny, my co-workers. But I switch the units to 25°C – considered the ideal indoor temperature – and wait for the protests. We fight over the air-con regularly anyway, so the office usually vacillates between feeling like a sauna without circulation to the inside of a refrigerator, forcing people to wear bathrobes, scarves on their heads and socks with sandals. Again, not pretty. Our office has already instated a green printing policy to conserve paper – people have to print double-sided, use smaller fonts and recycle. I try to take the recycling a step further by setting up a bin for cans with a sign clearly marking it. I also hide my co-workers’ personal waste bins and drag one large rubbish can into the centre of the office, so they have to get up each time they throw something out (another constant reminder). I’m hoping this experiment works, but let’s be honest: their reaction alone will be priceless.

9.30am ‘Did you hijack my rubbish bin?’ ‘If my area starts to stink because of that giant bin, this is over.’ ‘Can I print more if I do it for other reasons, not the magazine?’ ‘I hate you and the environment.’ Brilliant. Someone starts a recycling bin for plastic too, though. That’s the spirit!

10.16am There’s already a polystyrene cup, straw wrappers and paper towels in the plastic recycling bin. Note to self: review the rules of recycling for everyone.

11.07am My first real test: go get a coffee at Killiney Kopitiam and ask them to put it in my travel thermos instead of a cup with a plastic carrier. I’m expecting strange looks, but they barely bat an eye. In fact, the cashier looked at my thermos and smiled. Saving the planet, one kopi at a time.

11.36am Post-coffee, I go on my first office toilet break, designed to also be a green experience. Following Sheryl Crow’s lead, I’m only going to use three squares of toilet paper (she uses one, but she’s a pro at this), and will try to follow the adage of ‘let it mellow if it’s yellow’ to save water. (‘But if it’s brown, flush it down.’) TP conservation goes smoothly, but I stare in awkward silence at the toilet and guiltily flush. I’ll try to save water at home, but at work, it’s too gross. Besides, I think I could get fined for not flushing a toilet here.


1.13pm Cut my finger on heavily packaged plastic pot of hummus (my vegetarian snack). Going green is painful.

2.20pm One co-worker is throwing rubbish in her purse instead of getting up to toss it away. I also notice I go through an absurd number of Post-it notes and paper towels daily – can probably cut back on that – and that my garbage is starting to stink. The good news, though, is that no one is complaining about the air-con.

3.47pm For lunch, my goal was to keep eating veggies – too many animals raised for consumption means too much methane gas produced, a major contributor to greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, I’m starving and craving McDonald’s. Oh well. I hit the Thunder Tea Rice stall at the Amoy Street hawker centre, which sells a pretty tasty rice dish with peanuts, green beans, tofu, carrots and lettuce with a green tea sauce. I bring my own Tupperware and spoon, again expecting strange looks. But nothing! If you think about it, you save the hawkers money by not using their plastic containers and utensils. I say no to plastic bags and chopsticks, and enjoy my planet-friendly meal, with my trusty rubbish bag at my side.

6.44pm End-of-day analysis: today was a qualified success. Though the recycling didn’t go well – we couldn’t even find bins outside the office to throw our cans in – people made small concessions. Plastic plates used at lunch were washed instead of thrown out, and we collected all our plastic bags to be reused as waste-bin liners. I realised how easy it is to use Tupperware, flip electricity switches and cut back on the waste I produce. And to this day, no one has complained about the temperature in the office.