How to tackle waste, the Marrickville Vietnamese community explores…

Waste has a very big impact on our community. The Marrickville community explores, learns and discusses how to tackle waste. “In the workshop, we discussed how we used to re-use and repair a lot more in Vietnam than we do here in Australia because often it is cheaper to just buy a new one” says Minh, our Vietnamese bilingual educator.

Water and waste workshops for the Vietnamese community were held in October at Marrickville Council Library with the help of Ms. Claire Hanley, an Environmental Project Officer at Marrickville Council.

I was lucky to have the support of Ms. Thao Do, the health educator of Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre and her group. The participants were a bit timid to raise the questions during the first workshop, but at the second workshop they brought friends and relatives and the number of people exceeded our expectations! It was fantastic to see so many people interested. The group was very supportive, energetic and keen to learn and talk about the environment. Together we learned about waste issues and we explored different ways to deal with the waste; what do we mean with waste? How is waste affecting our environment? Why has waste become an issue in our society? Where will waste go? What can we do to reduce our waste?

We talked about our experiences regarding waste from when we were in Vietnam, how we used to purchase things and had to repair, and try to re-use them as many times as we could. But now here in Australia, we see that the cost of labour is too high and exceeds the price to purchase a new one.  We also discussed that many people throw out products that are still good and replace them with newer ones. This happens especially with high-tech appliances such as home phones, mobile phones, computers, laptops and televisions.

We then explored different ways to reduce waste; think carefully before purchase something; distinguish between what we want and what we need; choose things carefully to make sure it’s durable, for short term needs we can borrow or hire, when we no longer want it we can choose to hold a garage sale or things away to friends or charity instead of disposing of them.

At the end we all agreed that waste has a significant negative impact on our environment and everyone should try his/her best to reduce it. We thanked for the support of Ms. Hanley and Marrickville Council for the opportunity to sit together to discuss an important issue in our nowadays society.