Singapore has a population of 5 million, but we still insisted on using 3 million plastic bags in 2011. That is an unnecessary amount of bags used for groceries, late-return DVDs, hidden knives, illegal cigarette packets from Indonesia and other things you don’t need plastic bags for.
And according to (NEA), in 2012, each person in Singapore produced an average of 1,370kg of waste, of which 40 per cent was disposed. Of that disposed waste, 25 per cent and 2 per cent of recycled waste was plastic.
The figures were released by World Wildlife Fund (Singapore) and Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA) in the lead up to Earth Hour on March 29, to encourage Singaporeans to take the pledge on four key actions – to turn up air-conditioning by 1 degree Celsius, use fewer plastic bags, switch to LED lights and take shorter showers.
While Singapore may not be as guilty as China, where a population of 1.3 billion people uses 3 billion plastic bags daily, according to reusable materials retailer, Reuseit, we have some way to go to improve our own statistics.
At Contented’s office, we’ve got all of those actions sorted, but this author has particularly taken the pledge to use fewer plastic bags after coming across one of WWF Singapore’s advertisements.
It’s a standout ad that contains a glaring grammatical error in the headline, asking people to use “less” plastic bags. Unless plastic bags were an unquantifiable object, like weed, then the correct usage would be “fewer”. So if your children above the age of 21 are in Colorado studying in college, you’d be grammatically on the spot if you told them to “smoke less weed and fewer joints”, but you’d be wrong for stemming their freedom to enjoy the herbal and natural goodness provided by Article 18, section 16 of the state’s constitution.
So, to save Earth Hour and WWF Singapore from all those nasty comments from grammar Nazis, we’re pretty sure the ad meant:
Useless plastic bags
We’re sure it was play with the spacing and besides, the important thing here isn’t bad copywriting, but rather, that plastic bags are bad. Okay?
WWF-Singapore, we have your back, yo!
