SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION- COSMETIC PRODUCTS AND BOTTLED WATER

From the “story of Cosmetic”, I examined the ingredients listed on the labels of cosmetics or other skin care products and know what those ingredients are. I also realise the toxic cosmetic ingredients are commonly found in your everyday personal care products.

We are now a day are constantly bombarded by the media to use the different cosmetic products that we believe its benefit to us, all we focus on is the benefit side of the product, but we never realise that the ingredients inside the product will harm our health and cause disease to our body, like cancer.

We buy all these products thinking they are “good” for us and apply them daily, trusting that the long and unpronounceable list of ingredients are not hiding anything that could potentially harm us. But the truth is the cosmetic harm our health a lot!!! We don’t understand the disadvantage of these toxic ingredients, because we only receive little guidance from product manufacturers, whose advertising and labelling are too often misleading and not objective sources of information.

Many people may not realize that many of the skin care products and cosmetics you are buying contain ingredients that are not only harmful to your skin, but also to your long term health. Many of these ingredients are cancer-causing substances (known as carcinogens) and are used by the cosmetic industry simply because they are cheap! Cosmetic companies themselves are held responsible for the safety of their own products, because there’s no requirement for safety testing of products before they are sold to the public. As a result and driven by profit rather than a concern for human health and well-being, personal care products are often filled with hazardous chemicals.


From the video, I have learnt that there are numbers of ways to avoid these toxics. Firstly, examine the labels of your cosmetics and skin care products carefully, and learn to recognize ingredients that are harmful to your skin and to your health. Many web sites have lists of potentially harmful ingredients in addition to those shown above (e.g. Environmental Working Group).
Don't be fooled by the words 'natural' or 'organic' on the front of the label. Many products contain at least one or two natural or organic ingredients, but they may also contain harmful synthetic chemicals as well.
In the future whenever possible, I will choose the products with 100% natural ingredients such as essential oils and herbs, which both benefit to our health and environment.

For the other video review “the story of bottle water”, After I watched the video, I realise how much unnecessary money I have spent on the water bottle and also make me realise how often I bought the bottles, the reason of buying it, is they are convenience and easy to get. The other problem that I cannot believe is most of the bottled water comes for the water tap, which shows the lies that the spring water company give to the consumer and the irresponsible that company give to the society and environment.

Reflection on Recycling

From all the video I watched, I noticed that all raw materials and all energy are provided by our planet, earth, but they are not endless. Unfortunately, most of the provided raw materials and energy are not usable as they appear in Nature and are spread globally in deposits. I also realise if we don’t reduce the numbers of the waste, our planet will be badly damage. In order to save our planet, we are not only focus on the recycling the waste, but also how to use the material efficiently, therefore minimise the waste.

Men need to use a lot of energy and resources to produce the materials we need. So the waste will be continually produced. Therefore the only method that we can save our planet is reduce the waste and it can be done by collect, clean, concentrate, and transform these resources to generate primary raw materials that are usable for people and industry. As a designer, we are not only design the product, but we also need to notice the problems that our planet have nowadays, then our design need to be concern and fit  into the current issue, therefore our design will be useful and functional to our society. And one of the big problems now is environmental issue.
For many of us, recycling has become a part of our daily, or at least weekly. I understand that recycling helps conserve natural resources, and most of people know that recycling conserves space in our landfills. From these recycling ways that we have now, I realized that many people pay attention to the waste problems and try to protect the environment that we live in. Because of the environmental issues now a day, there are more and more environmental designers (eco-designer) that try to design the environmental products for our planet.  Recycling make the product able to re-use and recycling also conserves energy and water and helps to reduce air and water pollution. So there are so many benefits to recycling!!

For example, production of recycled paper uses 80% less water and 65% less energy, and produces 95% less air pollution than virgin paper production.  If every American recycled his or her newspaper just one day a week, we would save about 36 million trees a year. For every four-foot stack of paper you recycle, you save a tree. So recycling is very important job for all of us to do in order to save our planet. After watch the video and as a designer, I strongly realized how important it is for us to combine our design to the environmental issue, we can do it by minimize the materials used when designing the product or choose the material that create less harmful to our environment. Save the planet is important, because if we do not take more actions to save our planet, our planet will be destroyed.

My Ecological Footprint

REFLECTION:
After I completed the questionnaire on ecological footprint, I realized I need to change my daily habit in order to reduce my footprint.
For example, I need to reduce my housing and food footprint, because from the above histogram, my household footprint is little above the country’s average. There are numbers of way to reduce my footprints, one of the ways is to flush the toilet less often since flushing the toilet consume large amount of water. Other alternatives included changing the showerhead to water saving type and spend less time on showering.
Lastly, I feel it is important to keep the footprints consumption as low as possible, so we can create a better world for the future generation.