When we take care of the environment, we take care of ourselves:
Mutabar Xushvaktova on healthy habits
Text: Irina Perova
All over the world, politicians, activists and consumers are worrying about the environment and trying to figure out how to take care of it. While companies are being created to clean the seabed, recycle waste and fabrics, and limit greenhouse gas emissions, it is worth thinking about your own contribution to solving this difficult problem.
On her Instagram channel, Mutabar Xushvaktova talks about the most important environmental issues, attracting more and more attention to the need to care for the environment in Uzbekistan.
Mutabar is a journalist by education. Even as a child, she loved nature and nudged her peers to take care of it. ‘I’m an anxious person,’ she explains. ‘I always worried what would happen if the water ran out.’
With the birth of her daughter, this feeling intensified. It was the impetus for the creation of an eco-blog. But most people don’t like to listen to environmental issues for too long. They get either scared or bored. Mutabar’s solution? ‘My goal is to talk about ecology in an interesting and humorous way,’ she says. ‘I've been doing it for about two years now.’
‘Start with yourself,’ she recommends. Here are four simple steps you can take to take care of nature:
Give up everything disposable. For example, instead of buying bottled water every day, buy a reusable bottle and use it for a long time, refilling it from a dispenser.
Avoid using wet wipes – they take 500 years to decompose. Since we don’t have a way to recycle them in Uzbekistan, the only way out is to simply remove them from everyday use.
Store spent batteries at home, ideally in a dark, dry place. What's wrong with batteries? They’re hazardous waste. One leaky AA battery can pollute 20 square meters of land and 400 litres of water. How long should you keep them? Until appropriate disposal points are opened.
Reject plastic bags. They take between 200 and 1000 years to decompose. After breaking apart, they turn into microplastics, which come back to haunt us embedded in drinking water, vegetables and meat.
‘I don't like the phrases "help nature" or "help the planet." They can handle it without us. When we take care of the environment, we’re actually taking care of ourselves. A big part of that is conserving water and electricity. Excessive use and changing climatic conditions are increasingly affecting the economy of every country. If we keep going as we are, there will be no water to drink, no food to eat, and no land to live on.’
A few more words of advice for those who like to picnic:
Don't leave anything behind. Leave the place as beautiful as it was when you got there.
Dig a small pit and bury all the organic waste there. In 5–10 days it will become fertilizer for the soil.
Don't light a fire. If you do, make sure you put it out properly and bury any embers that are still glowing so that the fire doesn’t spread to the forest.
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