Preserve our planet (From The Argus)

Preserve our planet

5:08pm Tuesday 10th March 2009

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By Annie-Marie Page, teen outlook »

I think a sense of social responsibility should be an important part of business. Now many people are showing more awareness of the environment and how we should look after it; people want to see their society being looked after by local businesses and more importantly the big businesses that make an enormous impact on our earth. From my experience I do not believe that many businesses demonstrate a sense of responsibility towards society.

Many plastic bags from the shops are seen strewn around the streets. Most of these plastic carrier bags are not recyclable, as well as polluting our earth they are injuring if not killing many animals.

Paper flyers are posted into our letter boxes every day. As soon as they come in my door I take a glimpse and then put them to be recycled. These companies are using hundreds of trees just for a bit of paper that hardly any one reads.

On the other end of the scale we have got even more extreme examples of businesses not taking a responsibility for society. At this very second child labourers will be slaving away for a very low wage. “According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 211 million children aged 5 to 14 in child labour worldwide”. We would say that these children are being exploited by the businesses they are slaving for.

However some businesses would argue that if the children didn’t have these jobs then they wouldn’t be able to feed their families. Businesses aren’t all bad; they give people jobs and opportunities.