晶文薈萃 十優文章

Good morning Principal, Vice Principals, teachers and schoolmates,

At present, students in our school are given lunch in polystyrene lunchboxes. In addition, each student is given a plastic bag containing a napkin, a pair of disposable chopsticks and a plastic spoon. The canteen is now going to start using recycled, reusable food trays next month. Students will need to bring their own cutlery and re-usable napkins to the school canteen for lunch each day. I totally support this new initiative because it will reduce waste. I hope you can understand the far-reaching benefits of reducing waste through my speech today.

First of all, I would like to talk about the benefits of using your own cutlery and reusable napkin. It will help reduce waste drastically because we needn’t throw away so much rubbish. We can rinse the re-usable items each day and re-use them the next day. In my opinion, it also assists reducing disposable cutlery for the canteen if each student brings and use re-usable cutlery and napkin.

Next, I consider it to be wrong to create lots of disposable napkins. People cut down trees for making the napkins, thus destroying the natural environment. Moreover, the problem of releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas will be aggravated during the process. If we keep using disposable items, I believe we will accelerate the rate of global warming further. Moreover, disposable plastic cutlery, like polystyrene lunchboxes, has longer decomposition period. Since they are non-biodegradable, not easily decomposed and recycled, all we can do with them is to dump them in the landfills, which means that our government has to build more landfills. However, I worry we don’t have more suitable spaces for the landfills. How about burning all the rubbish, you may ask. This will create a negative impact on the environment because the process releases harmful substances which cause air pollution and consequently, be harmful to our health.

Also, I think you are all in agreement with the global awareness of saving our environment; so you should bring your own chopsticks or spoons for reducing waste. You may moan about the inconvenience of bringing your own cutlery and washing them after lunch. However, if students continue to reduce the use of disposable cutlery, I trust less rubbish will be produced and thus release the pressure for more landfills. In return, the government can use the land for country parks or residential zones.

Finally, I think the new initiative launched by our canteen is a good one. It can help to save our earth and thus, needs our support. It is high time for us to rescue our Earth now. Please support the new initiative. Get ready to bring your cutlery and reusable napkin next month.

Thank you.