Her field trips led the way to a green discovery

ONE ARDENT ECO-LOVER
Agatha Koh Brazil, Today Online 19 Aug 08;

DR TAN Lay Pheng gets to bring her work home and she is happy about it.

The 37-year-old mother of two young daughters is an environmentalist who works at Republic Polytechnic (RP) with researchers and industries on ways to better the environment.

At home, she consciously walks the talk of energy conservation to impart the message to her daughters as “children learn from examples”. So much so that the older one, who is five, chirpily reminds cashiers at supermarkets “no plastic bag please”.

Dr Tan recently received an Ecofriend Award from the National Environment Agency for her work in the public sector. She chairs the Tertiary Institutions Council for the Environment (Tice) which includes members from the three universities and five polytechnics and reaches out to more than 100,000 students.

Together with other key Tice members, she believes in nurturing youth leaders to fight climate change by organising eco-camps, where students showcase their ideas and implement them.

She traces her eco-friendliness to her undergraduate days. “I had lots of field trips ... then, we had a big problem with waste management,destruction of natural flora and fauna. There were also indications of the (then) future trend of global warming and ozone layer depletion,” she says.

That was 15 years ago and the interest in environmentalism that those trips engendered as well as the curriculum and the interactions Dr Tan had with her lecturers led her to do her Masters on the topic of converting waste such as plant compost, flyash and sludge to plant fertiliser.

All these, she says, are “bits” that “transformed” her into a “eco-friend”. Her doctorate was on clarifying how energy could be saved when growing temperate plants in tropical conditions — by cooling their roots.

On weekends, the family (her husband is a engineering lecturer at Nanyang Technological University) head for the parks and nature spots such as Lower Pierce reservoir to enjoy the outdoors.

Besides her work at the council,Dr Tan is also manager of environmental technology at RP. The institution is a leader in converting waste into a resource and Dr Tan manages these projects in collaboration with industry players. Her role is to “secure funding and grants, manage timelines, coordinate research efforts and getting them ‘married’ with the right industry players”. RP will hold its first environmental technology day on Sept 10, an event in which industry players as well as students will showcase their ideas for sustaining the environment.

Dr Tan takes the green message down to the masses too. One of her ongoing projects as a member of the Women’s Executive Committee in Kebun Baru Constituency is to spread the recycling message to the “uncles and aunties” of the heartland.

This eco-friend who counts her mother as her chief inspiration as she was “always recycling whatever can be recycled even since I was a small child”, is no “blind faith” tree hugger, however.

There is still lots to be done, she says, and that is why RP is strategic to her work because of the young student base to whom these value can be imparted.

One of her wishes is that “environment stewardship” is included in all curricula so that students will find it easier to undertake projects — which in turn will go a long way to keeping the issue firmly in their consciousnesses.

Another wish is for a change in infrastructure — for all “residential and commercial buildings to have separate chutes for recyclables/non-recyclables”.

And, of course, to reinforce the message to “turn off the air conditioner when we don’t need it”!