I am a child of the 21st Century. I remember shopping for veg at a grocers shop, meat at a butchers and the local store being a small shop on which we looked with amazement every time we went in. The first shopping trip I remember was with my mum going to the local grocers. He weighed everything and poured the items into our pull along trolley, bagging up soft fruit, mushrooms and tomatoes and putting them in the top. He knew my mum and had a chat with her as he worked. After all, she shopped there every few days so they knew each other very well.
We produced very little rubbish. We reused and recycled or passed things on.
In fact it paid to recycle when I was a child. You could get 10 pence for each glass bottle returned to the shop. We thought we (two of my brothers and I) had hit the motherlode when we found a box full of Cresta pop bottles dumped down a country lane. There were about 15 bottles and we carried the whole lot.
That was 45 years ago.
A chat with a friend last week about recycling and the use of plastics had me looking round my house in horror. We are surrounded by plastic and stuff that is difficult to recycle.
The bathroom, the kitchen, the lounge. If it isn’t plastic it is coated in the stuff.
We are lucky in my city. the council recycles a lot of plastics including yoghurt pots, card and juice cartons. We have a bin that we fill fortnightly with plastic and card.
That is great…but…do I really need to be filling my bin with waste? Can I buy without having to put anything in the bin, recycling or not? It may seem green to recycle but it still requires energy and other products to process the materials. Even a born recycler like me has got comfortable with just chucking it in the bin.
Over the next year or so I am going to have a look at what it is I am doing with everything that I buy and what leaves the house, and work out how to Avoid, Reduce and Reduce the use everyday things rather than just recycle.
The garden is an excellent place to get started. Here are some ways I re-purpose plastics on the allotment:
Meat packaging cleaned thoroughly make great seed trays.
Various plastic trays (and a basket) which would have ended up as landfill.
You can’t see it so well but I cut the tops off plastic bottles and used them to protect the end of these posts (recycled tree branches).
More re use than re purpose. I wash out all used pots every year and store dry. A great winter task I can do bit by bit. I even clean up used plastic plant labels.
myjigsawmind 