World Environment Day, do people take it serious in Thailand?

June 5 is Environment Day World (WED). Its aims to foster positive environmental action globally.  As an ongoing campaign since 1972 UN aim is to stimulate worldwide awareness of environment and encourages political attention and action.

An event in Thailand points out the need for serious action. A sugar barge sank in Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya district of Ayutthaya on Tuesday, releasing  about 2,300 tonnes of sugar into the river.(Nation)

The sugar has been dissolving and polluting the water. Water quality in the Chao Phraya River section affected by massive amounts of sugar discharged from a sunken barge is expected to return to normal in three days, the Pollution Control Department says. However, PCD officials predicted that the water quality would return to normal by Sunday due to the large amount of water in the river and rainfall.

As a legal action, a law suite is file against the owner (TAN,for kids). The community should be aware and the government should set up authorities to sort out this problem as they do in other countries. PCD’s attitude seems to be that “no big deal, in two days it’ll be to normal”, that’s not good enough, in other countries for example, the EPA take this seriously and take action to prevent the event from happen in the first place. Also, compensation value should be consistent with the ability of the operator to take, the damage caused both direct and indirect. We’ve seen several cases in Thailand that the compensation value was way “under-estimated” for indirect impacts.

Co-Author - Gordon Wood

Updates on recycling campaign

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Referring to the blog about Recycling Campaign posted earlier, I’ve received updates about the activities done and results from Dr. Sujitra Vassanadumrongdee,   researcher at The Center of Excellence for Environmental and Hazardous Waste Management, Chulalongkorn University this morning.

Over the  period of the project (1 year), a total of 1,769 devices and 2,063 pieces of accessories (chargers and batteries) were collected. With promise to donate 2 US Dollars for every phone drop, Nokia and TES-AMM jointly contributed a donation of 110,000 Thai baht (about US$3,600) to support the university’s environmental fund. All collected phones were sent to TES-AMM for proper recycling. Coincidentally when looking the pictures, the TES-AMM personals running the campaign, Mr Luc Scholte van Mast and  Mr. Thawal Saengsawang were colleagues of mine. What a small world!

Recycling campaign

This morning while going through feeds, I found this very interesting as it symbolizes the life cycle of a plastic a male and female milk container. Starting from the factory till grave. Ends up the male milk container was trashed in dump, instead of ending up recycling like the female milk container.

<p>A Love Story… In Milk from Catsnake on Vimeo.</p>

It remains me of a program lead by EHWM at Chulalongkorn University to recycle used mobile battery, with the sponsorship from Nokia. Initiatives like this should be spread around the society to create environmental responsibility awareness.