Great Singapore Sale II: Going Green

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in The Straits Times “Great Sin­ga­pore Sale II” sup­ple­ment, Thurs­day, June 7, 2007

The Great Sin­ga­pore Sale (GSS) is upon us again, and this year, I’m try­ing a pos­i­tive atti­tude. (As opposed to sulk­ing while the wife sol­diers on through the throngs).

For me, a pos­i­tive atti­tude includes ‘going green’ — and I don’t mean what your face looks like when you finally get your credit card bills.

Global warm­ing is real, and if we’re going to do any­thing about cli­mate change, I reckon the Great Sin­ga­pore Sale is one event where you can put envi­ron­men­tally friendly habits into practice.

I know it’s a lit­tle hard to bal­ance what are appar­ent oppo­site prin­ci­ples and ‘buy­ing only what you need, and not what you want’ might dent the suc­cess of the GSS, but there are some things we can do to be envi­ron­men­tally con­scious while shop­ping till we’re uncon­scious.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Great Sin­ga­pore Sale, GSS, sin­ga­pore

You could, for instance, look through your wardrobe before hit­ting the sales to see what clothes you don’t or can’t wear any­more for rea­sons such as a change in fash­ion eras or in your size, and then do a lit­tle research to see what char­ity organ­i­sa­tions might be in need of hand me downs.

Look­ing through your book­shelves to see what tomes you might want to sell to the 2nd hand book­store might also clear some clut­ter in your house, and in my case, reduce the fire haz­ard in my liv­ing room.

For the men­folk who act as shopping-bag-and-credit-card car­ry­ing escorts for your spouses and part­ners, it may serve you, and planet earth, well if you sug­gest a few other changes to this season’s shop­ping spree:

Take pub­lic trans­port

Why clog the roads and pay even more in park­ing and ERP charges? Plus, have you seen the traf­fic dur­ing past GSS sea­sons? I call it the Great Sin­ga­pore Snail!

So I say, tell your part­ner you’re leav­ing the car at home to reduce green­house gas emis­sions while sav­ing your­self a bun­dle in on-road expenses as well as the fact that, with­out a car, you can’t carry as many shop­ping bags.

Yes, we all know bus wait­ing times are long, as are the jour­neys. But think about it, guys — the more time spent wait­ing and trav­el­ling, the less time spent spending.

If how­ever, the MRT and buses aren’t the way to go, see­ing as you need your hands for your bags while also hold­ing on to the rails, spend­ing a lit­tle on taxis is alright.

I hear there are eco-friendly taxis which use LPG fuel, but I think it’d be a bit hard to just pick out LPG cabs while stand­ing in a 20-odd pas­sen­ger long queue.

So if you really want to assuage your green-guilt, you could just ask your friendly cab­bie to turn off the air-con and wind down the win­dows — an envi­ron­men­tally friendly solu­tion that might just be nec­es­sary if your friendly cab­bie isn’t so hot on deodorants.

Recy­cle

So the Bring Your Own Bag scheme at super­mar­kets didn’t go down too well with cus­tomers, but if you dig out your old Gucci, Fer­rag­amo and Prada paper bags and bring them down to Orchard Road, not only will you save the trees, you’re also likely to get bet­ter cus­tomer ser­vice from sales staff who’ll think you’ve got greater than aver­age spend­ing power.

Apart from that you could also try telling your part­ner that you’re leav­ing the plas­tic at home and bring­ing only cash, because paper’s bio-degradable, but I think that’d be push­ing it a little.

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at his eco-friendly blog, http://miyagi.sg, for over three years