DURING the New Year’s Eve countdown let us avoid acts that pollute the environment and harm our wellbeing.
For a nature- and climate-friendly celebration of the upcoming New Year, we’re advising the public and private sectors against lighting firecrackers and fireworks, releasing balloons, setting off sky lanterns, burning trash and used tires, and littering during the revelry.
Keep the 2023 countdown activities as ecological as possible. Event organizers should refrain from doing things that tend to contaminate the air, land and water with wastes and toxins that can harm humans and other living things.
Local governments, media outfits, shopping malls, hotels, resorts, and households should put the protection of the natural environment a top priority in the many exciting events being planned to ring in the New Year.
Ensuring that planned events will cause no harm to the environment and the climate is necessary to protect “the right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology” as enshrined in the nation’s Constitution.
The ostentatious use of firecrackers and fireworks on New Year’s Eve blankets barangays, towns and cities with health-damaging toxic smog and should be totally avoided. Money intended for firecrackers and fireworks, which also end up as hazardous litter, should be used instead to support relief and reconstruction efforts in disaster-stricken communities such as those devastated by fires, typhoons and floods.
Yes, let us spurn the release of balloons at the stroke of midnight as these will subsequently pop and fall to earth as dangerous marine litter causing harm to aquatic animals who mistakenly eat the balloon pieces or get tangled up in balloon strings.
Like balloons, sky lanterns can cause injury and death to animals by the ingestion, entanglement and entrapment in the fallen lantern frames. Sky lanterns may also cause structural fires as well as wildfires, particularly when a lantern lands while the flame is still burning.
We further urge revelers not to set rubbish and used tires on fire. Open burning creates a toxic cocktail of fine particulates, heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants or POPs like dioxins.
Finally, we are reminding merrymakers, especially those who plan to greet the New Year in public parks, not to leave any trash behind. Let’s keep our parks clean, tidy and safe by not littering, smoking and vaping there at all times.
The joyful remembrance of the Christmas story is an opportunity for Christian Filipinos to rediscover the virtue of simplicity as exemplified by the birth of Jesus in a manger. Amid the growing threats of throw-away plastic culture to health and the environment, we are reminded to relearn and relive the simplicity of the Nativity and avoid crass commercialism and wastefulness during Christmas, New Year, and beyond.
Let us live our faith by loving our neighbors and caring for the environment.
