Ever heard of mountains in Colombo? Make no mistake, there are. Not the mountains most of us would like to see, in the hill country, but massive mountains of garbage. It has been said that the residents of Colombo discard more than 1.6 million pounds of garbage everyday. The result is that the air you and I breathe on a daily basis is polluted even more than we can imagine.

The 5th of June was World Environment Day. In a workshop held at the headquarters of The Girl Guides Association, our young friends marked the beginning of their commitment to making their environment a cleaner and safer place to live in.

To start with, the easiest step towards a better environment would be the three R's system, also known as Reduce, Re-use and Recycle. According to Mr. A. Iliyas of the Burns Compost Factory, we are only now realizing the harm we have created by dumping garbage in the wrong way.

"Many people do not realize," he says, " that we all contribute in our own way to the garbage problem, and that there are simple steps that we could all take towards solving the problem.”

Every day, we dispose of a huge amount of garbage. Where does it all go? Some 85% of our garbage is sent to a dump, or landfill, where it can take as much as 100 to 400 years for things like cloth and aluminium to decompose. Glass has been found in perfect condition after 4000 years in the earth!
This is where the three R's of the environment come in – reduce, re use and recycle. Reducing the amount of waste you produce is the best way to help the environment.

Many of the things we use every day, like paper bags, soda cans and milk cartons are made out of materials that can be recycled. Recycled items are put through a process that makes it possible to create new products out of the materials of the old ones. Making compost out of biodegradable material has also proved effective and is a practical way of converting garbage into something productive.

If we do not come to our senses and realize the impact we have on our environment, we soon will not have an environment to call our own.

So the next time you toss paper or plastic away, think first – your environment depends on it.