Someone far more organised than me informs me that it's yet another 'week', recycling week!
Let joy be unbound. Let us all rejoice, the world is saved, waste is no more, we can all chill out.
Actually, maybe that's a bit hasty...wait a mo. I still have to dodge the endless sea of crisp & chocolate packets strew over the streets floating like tumble weed into the unsuspecting lungs of a bird or baby hedgehog.
So clearly we've not recycled our way out of our waste problem. Bugger. Can we not just sort our lives out, stop wrapping everything in so much plastic & end all the 'weeks!'. I've not got the time, have you?
I saw that WRAP (an organisation that aims to tackle climate change, waste & all that jazz) believes that 88% of UK households regularly recycle. Not if you look down my street.
Tell me it's not just me? You see the cans & the cardboard all in thin plastic bin bags about to be chucked into landfill. Still so many people just don't seem to get it & not even the complicated stuff like milk cartons.
Britain is an island. You'd think that that would make us better at dealing with our crap before we drown in it, but noooooo. We ship it off to somewhere else, for another country to deal with. That doesn't sit right with me.
Now don't get me wrong. I remember watching a video where someone was telling me how poo I was for recycling (or that's how it felt), that we couldn't recycle our way out of the ridiculous amount of waste humans create. It's never ending.
I was like "you're kidding right?! It's like finding out that orange juice isn't actually good for you (but just some bloody good marketing from a glut in the 50s!). Can't I just recycle & feel righteous?"
Well yes, you're not just throwing something away so a little pat on the back every now & then won't hurt but the stats are really discouraging as to what actually gets recycled let alone how far it has to travel, what's really recycled & if we're all recycling the shiz out of shiz, what happens with all the recycled recycling?
"Yes we take food waste in Northampton", "no we don't take food waste in Wellingborough", "yes you can recycle tetra paks but only if you drive to a refuse centre, no we don't recycle tetra pak/ mixed cartons but only if you put it into the light of the silvery moon (the third blue moon of the millennia), the magical recycling unicorn might take it once you've made your sacrifice of a wasteful conglomerate to Gods of Sir David Attenborough."
What's the answer?
For one, recycling needs to be less confusing, rules need to be unified across the country so that you don't have to do a PHD in recycling if you move 10 miles down the road (or heaven forbid, across the country)!
Secondly, (& I know that you'll be surprised to hear it coming from a woman who felt so sodding compelled to do something about waste that she opened a zero waste shop in a massive global covid mess right before a whopping (what the hell do you call this that we're living through?!) Brexshit, cost of living crisis, mismanaged recession type thing) I personally believe that this new fangled thing called REUSING works pretty bloody well!
You take the beautiful glass jar that housed your coffee, mayo, pickles, whatever, that you're about to put in the recycling where it will be smashed up, heated to the temperature of the sun to be melted into (guess what?) more sodding glass in order to be turned into a jar for your pickles, mayo, coffee & instead you use it again:
to house your leftovers, to be a storage jar, or a beautiful vase, or fill it with homemade biscuits & give it to a friend/teacher/colleague/enemy as a gift. & that's if you don't live in Northamptonshire.
Because if you do, refill the sodding thing!!!!! Come to Food for Thought or make an online order & I'll collect it for your next order... see what joy can come from turning an empty container into one full of herbs & spices, or snacks, or pasta, or snacks or shampoo, or crisps, or snacks, or chocolate. Or snacks.
Don't worry, I know that I'm moaning. I promise that I'll be cheerier next blog. Well, I'll try.
Happy recycling week!
Kerry
Tag(s), you're it!
Recycling
