Angel sees green

MANILA, Philippines - Angel Aquino’s world is green, green, green. And she’s literally starting in her own backyard. When she’s not hosting Us Girls and corporate events, the Greenpeace movement advocate goes around her home, checking if the floors have been swept clean, the lights turned off and the appliances unplugged when not in use.

Weekends, when teenage daughters Iana and Thea are off from school, Angel visits their rooms and makes a quick survey. Have the girls  made their beds? Have they wiped all surfaces clean of dust? Are the floors free from stains or litter? Have the girls tossed their unwanted stuff in the trash can properly?

“You see, I’m an OC,” admits Angel. “I don’t like litter. Nanay brought us up to value cleanliness. We were taught to clean the house thoroughly and keep it spic and span.”
So sweep the house Angel did as a little girl wanting to please her mom. Years of doing this have taught her to come up with a technique that keeps the dust from flying off the broom and back to where it came from while she’s tidying the place.

Angel, broom in hand, would go around the house while her sister did the laundry.

“My mom assigned a chore for each one of us siblings,” Angel recalls. Dear mom would note each child’s “specialty” and assign the task accordingly.

Thus did Angel learn discipline, obedience and of course, cleanliness. It helped that she grew up in Baguio when the summer capital was not yet what it is now. Back then, Baguio was a city bursting with pine trees and thick foliage.

Angel knew how it was to wake up to the sound of birds chirping happily from trees. She knew how great it was to breathe the sweet, fresh scent of pine.

And so, at home, she trains her daughters to love Mother Earth. Iana even dreams of growing up to be an “attorney of the Earth like Mama” someday.

This means making compost out of the garbage and burying the household trash at the vacant lot just behind them. It means putting just the right amount of food on their plate to avoid left-overs.

Angel’s girls also believe in solar power to make most anything, like the TV remote, the calculator, work. Rechargeable batteries may look costly at first. But they’re cheaper in the long run because they last longer and are environmentally-friendly, notes Angel.

“We have to be practical,” says Angel.

So she turns off the air-con on cool rainy nights and makes sure lighting in places that don’t need much illumination, like hallways, is kept to a minimum.

LG Electronics took one look at what Angel has been doing and decided she was just the person they were looking for. Can she be the company’s poster girl for the company’s LG + Health Campaign? This way, she will have the title EcoMom, or a mother who promotes eco-friendliness.

Angel didn’t need any convincing. She said yes, yes, yes!

“I want my kids to be health-conscious,” Angel explains. And with fast-food joints multiplying all around us, this is becoming more and more a challenge.

Angel and fellow moms can take comfort in the fact that the LG refrigerator has a “vitaminized” storage that supplies vitamins to fruits. The microwave comes with a steamer for healthier cooking. The brand’s air-con units have an advanced filtering system that makes air fresh and virus-free. The washing machine‘s spinner doesn’t need any heating component (good for Mother Earth).

Now you know why LG also stands for Life is Good. It may be a tough reputation to keep. But company bosses promise that much, not just for mothers like Angel, but for the family they want to keep healthy, round the clock.