Cheng Ming and the pollution.

Every Cheng Ming, I always go into thinking.... I watch the thousands of pieces of paper go up in smoke up into the air. Yet, I know there really isn't much you can do about it. Take my family for instance.... Try telling my Grandfather or Aunt that we aren't going to burn paper as offerings to our ancestors this season. I probably won't survive to finish suggesting the idea... And my grandfather is no villageman. He is an educated man who reads 4 newspapers every morning and can debate any topic as widely as a person who specializes in it. Yet, you'll be hard pressed to convince him to stop burning the offerings.

Is burning bad? Of course it is, yet culture and tradition and whatever it is has a bigger hold than any other environmental issue... You can try to educate everyone on open burning and yet when it comes to Cheng Ming, they'll still burn it.

Let's take a look at what we are doing here ok? Paper is mostly cellulite that comes in the form of (C6H12O4)n. Now for the sake of argument, let's pretend that all paper is most basic hence, n=1 and that burning here is scientifically perfect.

Hence, burning 1 mole of C6H12O4 consumes 7 moles of oxygen and gives out 6 moles of CO2 and 6 moles of Water...

Now 500 sheets of 80gsm paper weighs 2.5 kg. Hence 1 sheet is 0.2g. Now, paper used in offerings can't be that high of quality so let's divide it by 2 then by 2 again as the paper is way smaller than standard size. So let's assume that one piece of offering paper is 0.05g.

So burning one piece of offering paper will give out an equivalent of 0.088g of CO2 into the air. One family will fold at least 30 pieces of paper so one family burns 1.5g of paper per grave. LEt's assume each family visits 4 graves bringing the total paper burned up to 6g per family. And there are at least 200 families at one graveyard = 1200g of paper burned. And say 10 graveyards in Penang = 12000g of paper.

So Penang itself burns 12000g of paper a day during Cheng Ming. We have released 11.056g of carbon dioxide into the air per day. Say this goes on for 3 days, we have successfully released 33.170g of CO2. That sounds little but remember that CO2 is a gas. At STP, this is equivalent to 10897 LITRES OF CARBON DIOXIDE.

I'm not saying stop tradition. I'm just saying control it. Burn what you have to and cut back on the useless things like paper cars and DVD players and air conditioners and clothes...

I wonder if anyone will let me do a study on how Cheng Ming contributes to global warming every year....

P.S. I painstakingly counted all that by myself. Ok, I will admit I'm not too good at doing equal counting seeing as how Chemical Engineering has brainwashed me into that nothing-converts-perfectly state of mind so I do apologize if the figures aren't right but it's something like that as far as I can remember....