I don’t know about you but I have been getting really fed up with the large amount of plastic and glass I have to throw into the recycling on a weekly basis. Every time I throw something away, for a start I can’t be sure it just won’t end up in a landfill in South-East China somewhere instead of actually being reused for something else at an adequate facility. But also I always wonder what it would take to allow me to keep that bottle for as along as possible and refill it somehow with the contents I had consumed.
Because let’s face it, there has been a mantra going strong for over 30 years in those of us environmentally conscious: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. And while the first and third are relatively easy to do as a consumer, the second isn’t. Taking a simple example of milk, in this country, as I understand it (since that’s never been a thing in France in my lifetime), people used to have milk delivered to their door. Old bottle would be reused by the delivery company and you’d get a fresh bottle every morning (or however often you liked). Now milk comes in cartons and once the carton is empty you simply put it in your recycling bin, which is frankly marginally better than just throwing it in the trash as there may be a whole set of reasons why the carton won’t be able to be recycled.
Now there are trials in a small selection of shops which will let you buy things by weight such as dried food (rice, cereals etc…) and some supermarkets let you bring your own containers if you buy meat from the counter as opposed to grabbing a pre-packaged item off the shelf. OF course such services involve having a member of staff serving you what you need, and that costs money.
Fruit and vegetables wrapped in thin plastic wrappers is also a big pet peeve of mine, and because this country isn’t as agriculturally active as others, you don’t tend to have weekly (or even daily) farmer’s markets where you can buy freshly grown fruits and vegetables so most of it ends up imported, and what’s imported needs to be packaged also. I don’t know what the solution is as there are too many market variables to this connundrum but I do hope as a society we find a way to move away from so much plastic packaging which requires oil drilling and manufacturing only to end up in a landfill where it will take centuries to decompose …
