A consciousness about environment involves a commitment that is not only lifelong but encompasses more actions and takes a lot more thinking. From simple everyday actions to major decisions. A good beginning has been made with people discouraging use of plastic and polyethylene in for example shopping bags, which can be easily made with old newspapers for convenience of customers and can create a small scale industry with poor or enterprising home workers making extra money and supplying it to neighbourhood shops. That is on an everyday scale and doable by everyone around.
There are many such small things people can do on small scale and they can add up to worldwide huge scale to save the planet. One of them is not wasting food, or anything that can become food. It sounds obvious but in practice it is not done in the richer nations at all. For example when vegetables are bought a lot of parts are thrown away, either by the consumers or by those that are providing consumers with ready packets with the throwaway parts already thrown away. And of course there is the contrast of animals for slaughter being fed what humans can eat while whole nations - at least one continent, Africa, too - has major problems feeding people, which is to say people have been starving for well over two decades. It is good but not good enough to send a cheque - change habits so you lose little and they benefit.
In India all throwaway parts of food are fed to animals - preferably cattle of course, but when you have pigs they can pretty much clean out your kitchen garbage, which is actually not garbage in the sense of absolutely must throw away, only in the sense of most people being unable to eat such things. Stems, peels, hard parts of various raw things, stalks. Why feed grain and other perfectly good human consumable food to pigs and other such, if they can eat stalks of farm products and grain can be separated for humans need and use?
Of course it might need a little more thought and management and logistics - when things are on large scale. On small scale it is easier to make a self supporting system this way, as there existed all over the planet when we were not using quite so much fuel for shipping and wasting food on huge scale on one hand while pigs were - quite unnecessarily - fed what humans could eat and need it across the planet.
This would be a good way to manage the escalating food prices too, within the nations that do produce food.
And while one is about it, why waste resources and money on throwaway packages when one can avoid it? Attractive packaging is a moment's temptation weighing down the planet and wasting precious resources including your own sweat and blood. Try saving it - go with mostly large scale shopping and minimize packaging that is only throwaway.
