Speech Contest About the Environment

QUICK FACTS
Where? School of the Arts Singapore, for short, SOTA.
SOTA, 1 Zubir Said Drive,
 Singapore 227968.
Nearest MRT station ............ line ..........

When? All day.
Saturday June 23

Cost?
What is SOTA? A school of the arts, pre-tertiary, for ages 13-18.

If you miss this, many more opportunities to support the environment, hear speeches or learn to make speeches.

Useful Websites
https://www.sota.edu.sg/
https://www.facebook.com/sotavenues

Toastmasters International find a club
https://www.transitlink.com.sg/images/eguide/mrt_sys_map.htm
Toastmasters Club of Singapore, big and buzzy, currently (June 2019) meets the first three Mondays of the month at the Sheraton Towers Hotel by Newton MRT station. Cost $20. A

https://www.toastmasters.org/find-a-club
(More pictures and text later)

Environment
https://www.nea.gov.sg/media/news/news/index/more-than-1-600-premises-team-up-with-nea-to-say-yes-to-waste-less

Training for marketing and performing and selling your service
Harry and Lily
Book
by Lily Patrascu
Peak Performance Sales
ISBN 9781095059531
www.SpeakersAreLeaders.com
www.BrandForSpeakers.com
www.lily.global/writeabook

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, atuhor and speaker. If you would like a speech on the environment, please contact me.

Say Yes To Less Waste - National Environment Agency

2019 is the year towards zero waste. Not a new idea to me.

I was brought up to save things and repair. Before the creation of the catchy phrase, reuse, recycle, my mother who lived through two world wars, awas used to saving items. In the UK rationing went on after the war (WWII) ended in 1945, until 1952. During the war shortages of everything meant improvisation and reuse. Famously, white silk parachutes were turned into wedding dresses.

In the UK boy scouts frequently knocked on the door asking for donations for jumble sales. Nowadays nobody wants torn or stained items. You could take the buttons or zips out of clothes or even handbags before giving them to jumble sale and the collectors were still glad to have the items.

 UK charity shops and collectors for fund-riaisng sales in churches and synagogues ask for items in good condition and saleable items. But you can still sell bundles of fabrics to collection shops which pay you by weight, to recycle the fabrics.

I have been trying to repiar umbrellas. I rescue items of furniture.

I worry that we used to try to save trees by not using paper bags. Now we are turning against plastic and back to paper bags, often bearing slogans saying that they come from sustainable forests.

In Singapore, at a toastmasters Club, I was invited to enter a public speaking contest about protecting the enivronment.



https://www.nea.gov.sg/media/news/news/index/more-than-1-600-premises-team-up-with-nea-to-say-yes-to-waste-less

Fish pond in Community Centre in Singapore

Harrow in north west London in England put out an appeal for suggestions when redeveloping the town centre. I had some ideas, and pictures. 

In Singapore water features are included for feng shui. Feng shui which means wind water. That is a succinct way of saying being calmly and harmoniously in tune with surroundings and environment. 

Harrow, and developers and architects worldwide, please copy the idea of water features.  

See my later post on fish.

Fish pond in Community Club, Singapore. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

Please share links to your favourite posts.

Travel statistics: How many tourists travel each year and where to?

Problem
How many people travel? Which are the most popular places? I've always wondered.

Answer

 "Europe’s tourism industry employs 12 million people and generates over five percent of GDP. Europe is the world's number one tourist destination. By 2030 we can expect 800 million visitors every year. " So said, Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fish.

"But what we need is a forward-looking vision: rather than the world's ‘No.1 travel destination’, we should aspire to becoming the world's top ‘Eco-travel destination’.” A new toolkit providing smart tips for greening the hospitality sector, takeagreenstep.eu, has just been launched. The website shows hotel and restaurant owners and managers how they can improve the environmental performance of their businesses. 

Hotels Helping The Environment
So we have two stories. The first is about what hotels can do to help the environment. For example, the Rafael Hotel, in London, England, is designed to use natural lighting and use rainwater. They have a policy of no plastic. Drinking water is supplied to guests in glass bottles instead of plastic bottles. The toiletries in the bathrooms attached to bedrooms have soap in wall dispensers instead of the small plastic bottles. To keep the customers happy, they upgrade the quality of the gel, which has an organic, environmentally friendly source.

Doesn't this deter customers? Apparently not. The hotel seems pretty busy, to go buy the bookings announced on the websites such as booking.com and Tripadvisor which give minute by minute updates. "This hotel has been booked XX times in the last 24 hours. XX rooms left."

The other story is the number of us who go travelling.

Let's make numbers clear and simple to understand.

Europe is the world's number one tourist destination. More than the Americas or Asia.
The European tourism industry employs 12 million people.

Who says Europe s number one? The UN. They also have tables of the most visited countries in each continent.

Rank	Destination	International tourist arrivals (2016)[1]	International tourist arrivals (2015)[1]	Change (2015 to 2016) (%)	Change (2014 to 2015) (%)
1	France	82.6 million	84.5 million	2.2	0.9
2	United States	75.6 million	77.5 million	2.4	3.3
3	Spain	75.6 million	68.5 million	10.3	5.5
4	China	59.3 million	56.9 million	4.2	2.3
5	Italy	52.4 million	50.7 million	3.2	4.4
6	United Kingdom	35.8 million	34.4 million	4.0	5.6
7	Germany	35.6 million	35.0 million	1.7	6.0
8	Mexico	35.0 million	32.1 million	8.9	9.4
9	Thailand	32.6 million	29.9 million	8.9	20.6
10	Turkey	31.3 million[citation needed]	39.5 million	24.6	0.8

I was surprised that France ranks so high, above the USA.

A surprise from another table is that the small island of Macau, with its casino. gets more visitors than India. Now I know why the World Travel Market, held annually in the UK at ExCel in East London, has such a large number of stands for cities and regions of France, states in the USA, and regions of Spain, China, Italy and the UK.

GDP is gross domestic product, an American term for the market worth of the production of a country in a year.

Wikipedia's useful information gets better and better. Just what I wanted to know. The tables are taken from the UN. But because I found them on Wikipedia I knew it was more likely that I would find material which was copyright free so I could reproduce it and show it to you.

Hotel Rafael, London, England
Hotel Rafael is a newish hotel, upmarket. Prices on booking.com started at £159. On Tripadvisor they had a room at £109.

The Rafael is not like Holiday Inn, which was originally designed as the answer to unpredictable Mom and Pop hotels; instead Holiday Inn had identical rooms throughout the hotel and the world, so the customer can know exactly what they were getting.

No, in Hotel Rafael the rooms vary in size and therefore in price. You pay much more for a suite with a Jacuzzi. The hotel has a spa and two restaurants. It employs some, not all, of those 12 million people in the tourism industry.

Useful Websites For Travellers
www.hotelrafael.com

https://www.visitengland.com/

http://us.france.fr

https://www.booking.com/
www.tripadvisor.co.uk
https://www.visitusa.org.uk
http://www.spain.info/en_GB/
https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/china Advice on passports, visas, safety and etiquette for all countries, for the British. The US and other countries have websites for their nationals.
http://www.italia.it/en/home.html
https://www.visitbritain.org
https://twitter.com/govisitgermany

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.