Pen-Bin – One small step towards Sustainable Development

While talking about our Goals and the ways to achieve them, it seems something big and difficult. A long journey is easier when divided into small steps.

Today we are talking about Sustainable development and G20 goals. These goals can be achieved by taking simple and small steps.

As individuals, we have a close connection with pens. Pens have fascinated us since our childhood, especially the pen having four coloured refills in it together.

Just like other things, pens have also changed a lot with time. In the beginning we used to have fountain pens, where we used to fill ink to make it write. Then pens with refills emerged in the market. A refill was an easy and affordable solution to extend the life of pens. We could use the majority of available pens repeatedly for a long period of time.

Now in the last few years pens have totally changed. On one hand we have good quality expensive pens of different brands, which have their own standard refill. On the other hand we have reasonable plastic pens, which are cheaper but all non-refillable. We prefer using these kind of pens because getting an appropriate refill for our pen is also a task in today’s time.  Most of the manufacturers have started making cheap plastic pens because these are in high demands.

Surveys have proved that most of the people buy loose pens frequently as their value is less. If we count and multiply number of pens used and thrown by the people every day, month or year, a shocking scenario of the amount of wasted plastic pens comes out.

As per goals of sustainable development we need to make the people aware about less or no use of plastic. Somehow we are forgetting about this smallest thing which is used by every human being i.e. SINGLE USE PLASTIC PEN.

We should start a drive where transparent Pen-Bins should be kept at different places. When people throw their single used pens in them, they would be able to see unimaginable number of pens discarded regularly. This will stimulate their brains to actually spare a thought towards sustainable development.

We can also file a petition that the manufacturing and usage of single-use plastic pens should be completely banned. Instead, good quality pens along with four to five refills should be introduced which would suffice anyone’s usage for a decent time period.

This small step will lead us to the main goal (SDG-12) of Sustainable Development towards adding up one of the most harmful component to the environment i.e. PLASTIC.