Zero waste is an ethical, economical, efficient and visionary concept. It guides people to lead a cleaner lifestyle, leaving less carbon footprints in the world, whilst creating a sustainable cycle where all discarded materials are meant to be future resources for future usage. Zero waste first began with an idea, and soon changed the world and turned itself into an ideology.
| Approximately 3,500,000 tons of plastics and other solid waste are popping up in various parts of the world. |
|---|
| Only 9% of plastic ends up in the recycling bin. |
| Another 12% are incinerated. |
| Remaining 2.8 Million of waste ends up in landfills, rivers and the ocean. |
Due to this reason, our team strongly stand by the concept of zero waste and acknowledges the importance of creating a sustainable process. We are students from IMU‘s Pharmaceutical Chemistry programme (PC119) who wants to create an impact in others with our decision to run a Zero Waste Campaign. Our purpose and vision are to ensure that the IMU community is well educated with the following idea. Our community project team member includes Chiah Ruey Chee, Veenusha, Loh Wai Han and Brandon Yeoh Yoong Xin.
| To inculcate the Zero Waste idea at IMU, we build our project based on these 3 segments: |
|---|
| Raising Awareness |
| A Call to Action |
| Creating a Long-term Impact |
Successfully raising awareness lies in the party that delivers the message. Hence, we invited various organisations which stand by the idea of Zero Waste to IMU:
| Organisations | Description |
|---|---|
| iCycle | A social enterprise that connects communities to real time recycling data and activities. With these data, they are able to monitor and track the performance of the recycling activities. |
| The Lost Food Project | A food bank in Malaysia that rescues all quality, nutritious surplus food that would otherwise end up in the landfill. Lost Food Projects then redistributes all these food to those who are in need regardless of their religion, gender, age, disability or ethnic group. |
| The Hive | The first zero waste store in Malaysia offering over 300 bulk whole foods option. The Hive was able to demonstrate the values and process of Zero Waste which gave the students and staff an opportunity to interact and embark on a Zero Waste journey. |
| Kloth Cares | A social enterprise initiated by three bright young minds to keep fabrics out of landfills by setting up a drop off point in IMU to collect old, used cloths. |
Anne Marie Bonneaus, the Zero Waste Chef, once said “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly”.
Our team hope that we would have the opportunity to host such an impactful and meaningful event again next year. If we have this opportunity, we would like to scale up the outreach of the event by reaching out to more students and inviting more organisations to IMU.
Written by Chiah Ruey Chee
