A Rant About Rubbish

My grandmother's shopping basket filled with home-grown produce (2013)

Why is it that so few kitchens are designed with rubbish disposal in mind?  Out of all the rooms in the house, the kitchen probably generates more rubbish than any other.  Most packaged items that come into this house, come into the kitchen as wrapping around various food items. 

We have rubbish bins and a recycle bin outside, but it has to be collected first in the kitchen.  The solution is to keep a bin on the floor or a bucket under the bench, until there is enough rubbish to remove it to the bins. 

With all our modern technology, why is there not a simpler quicker easier more-hygienic way of disposing of unwanted rubbish? (I have no idea what could be done, I am not an inventor).

I know packaging is needed in some cases.  Who would want to buy a frozen chicken with no wrapping around it?  But in some cases the wrapping is quite superfluous.  Small bananas for instance.  Do they really need to be sold in bags – why can’t they be left loose like the larger bananas?  

My grandmothers both used shopping baskets, but they also shopped every day.  Our grocery shopping is done once a week, and it is a ten minute drive to reach our nearest supermarket.  Imagine the extra pollution if we did that every day.

I remember one grandmother telling me they never had a roadside rubbish collection.  All food scraps made their way into the compost heap or the chicken run, and everything else was burned in an incinerator.  I can remember these smelly contraptions belching smoke and ash out into the atmosphere, and that was without all the plastic and petroleum-derived packaging that we use today.  

Glass, which was the chief hard packaging used, was thrown into a hole in the ground in the backyard.  When it got full, it was covered in with earth and a new hole dug.

A Council-provided recycling bin, and our two rubbish bins

On 1 July this year the government banned the use of “one-use” plastic bags.  Fair enough, there are far too many plastic bags making their way into the refuse tip.  But we used to use those supermarket bags for so many things that they were truly “multi-use.”  Now we use far more single-use plastic bags – the difference being we have to buy them with our regular groceries.  They are needed for rubbish bin liners, garden waste, wet swimsuits, for giving something messy (like a freshly dug plant) to someone, for holding so-called disposal nappies when traveling, doggy-do bags, and all those other little uses.  I am conscious of every bit of plastic we use, but alternative options are severely limited.

When I first married, supermarkets packed our groceries into brown paper bags.  The reason given by the supermarkets to replace these with plastic bags, was that we were too rapidly depleting our forests.  Do our forests grow faster now? 

I have a sneaky feeling that big business will always consider the dollar before they ever think about environmental issues.  Plastic bags were cheaper than paper bags.  Now, they don’t have to supply bags at all unless they sell them to you.  That must make a difference to the profit margin! 

Whew!  I feel much better for that rant and rave about rubbish.  I know rubbish is a huge problem in our society, and I also realise there is no easy answer.  This is the world that we live in.  We can do what little we can on a personal basis, but that is as far as we can go.  I cannot see that the governments of this world will ever agree with each other to make radical changes to the way industry and business operates.  Now, don’t get me started on Climate Change!!

Be mindful of your environment,

Margaret