Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Washing Garbage

When I was kid, now admittedly that was a long time ago, I used to open a can, dump out it's contents and throw the can in the garbage. The can, after all, was just a container whose purpose had already been served. So it was open, dump and throw. Back then, microwave ovens hadn't been invented and most people cooked their meals from fresh meat, fish, fowl and vegetables which don't really generate a lot of waste. Meat came from the butcher wrapped in paper and veggies came in whatever natural wrapper God gave them. Potato peels, apple cores watermelon rinds and corn husks all got thrown on the compost heap, which did what compost heaps do, and ultimately furnished rich loamy soil to feed the garden.

Then we got more sophisticated and dinner now comes pre-cooked and pre-packaged to make things more convenient and consequently produces a lot more non usable garbage that we're quickly running out of places to store. The empty plastic and foil containers can't be composted, so now we need to recycle them. Of course gone are the days when you can open, use, and throw. Now after use, the empty container has to be stored for weeks and if you live in a townhouse like I do, there is no room anywhere to store enormous garbage, recyclable, and organic waste bins. There is barely enough room in the garage for the car, let alone these huge bins and smaller bins won't hold weeks worth of garbage. So that means they need to be stored in the house, the only remaining space. To avoid the stench of rotting garbage we have to carefully wash all of these containers before storing them.

This week again I marvel at how far we've come as I wash out cans, bottles and tubs, literally washing garbage before I pitch it out.

I'm all for protecting the environment, but I wonder if governments were really sincere about reducing waste if they couldn't find some way to reduce the garbage at the source. You know what I mean. Every time you bring something home from the store it's wrapped up like a mummy. Component parts are wrapped in plastic bags and then fitted inside protective styrofoam blocks with cardboard spacers holding things in place inside the cardboard box, which is inside shrink seal cellophane. Overkill much?!!??

A long time ago, when a lot of the jobs went overseas because of the cheaper work force, one of the ways a manufacturer could still claim the product Canadian made was if a certain percentage of the product was made here. In practice, that meant that it could be identified as Canadian, even if the only thing Canadian was the packaging, as long as the Canadian content dollar wise, met the threshold. Guess where some of the excess packaging started coming in?

In all fairness, since most of the manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, the products that we use every day have to come back from overseas to be sold here and in all that travel you don't want something like a large TV to get a hole poked in it just because it wasn't sufficiently protected.  But somewhere, somehow, there has to be a happy balance.

In the interim, I'm stuck here, washing garbage.


4 comments:

Madtatter80 said...

It is funny, but not ha ha funny :) I have a big freezer and I don't have a disposal in the sink so some of my stinky garbage I freeze till the garbage pic up once a week, This is in the summertime only. but we have very little winter here. I guess you could call it food for thought :)

Jane McLellan said...

I'm with you absolutely. Lately I've been reading articles about how individuals can reduce waste, but really I think the manufacturers must use less packaging. All these packets within packets and two pieces of meat in a styrofoam tray are crazy.

Margarets designer cards said...

I'm with you and Jane, in the uk they are telling us about waste, but really the packaging, has become a big problem, to the point that one supermarket wrapped a coconut in plastic, there was an outcry about it. The waste mountain grows but it's mostly packaging that causes a lot of it. In the uk they put a best before date on food so people look at the food and think it's not ok so they throw it out, years ago we did not have dates on it, we eat it and it did not go off before any date. Do away with all this date on food, half of it is still OK to eat.
As for manufacturing, in the uk we have lost a lot of manufacturing so a lot of our stuff comes from other countries. It would be nice if we went back to making things, then the cost of travel etc would be less.

Lavinia said...

You really give us something to think about... I remember when a lot of food packaging used to be newspaper, which is nice, because people were reusing the papers. Now we have brand new wrapping paper that is printed to look like an old newspaper. It has become a bit ridiculous...