Black Friday Mauls Environment

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New phones have new designs, covers and chargers. 
We throw out old phones and their appendages.

We don’t need most of the things we will buy on Black Friday. They are just extras, but the environment doesn’t have extras. That’s why we wear face masks.

We polluted the air through our ‘economic development.’ Translate that into producing extra jeans and tops, extra cosmetics, kitchen appliances, plastic cards in our wallets, pumps for every product in our bathrooms and kitchens, drinking straws, soda cans, cellphones, computers, cars, sneakers, music speakers etc.

Black Friday extras were made in a factory somewhere and factories have waste just like us, in that can under the sink. Factories dispose of industrial garbage in rivers and the air, when they burn it.

Climate change is a boring subject. It is political. You shy away from talking about it for fear of being labeled socialist or leftist. There’s only one label trending now, SCARED. COVID-19 is in your face, in the form of a mask. Scientists are working on vaccines around the clock, but will they find a cure for a water COVID-19?

What happens when ‘economic development’ has reached a point where we have poisoned water. Are there face masks for polluted water?

‘Don’t be so fatalistic. It can never happen.’ 

The same way it never occurred to us that one day we will wear masks,  because the air is not only polluted, it has a killer virus as well.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.

 


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