The other day a friend was in hospital having an operation. I visited and he inclined his head towards a pile of elasticised bandages sitting on his bedside table.
He had rescued them from being thrown out, a common practice in hospitals, and suggested he could take them home, launder them and keep them ‘just in case’. Which he did. Both of us could see the logic of that decision and both of us felt appalled at the waste that even that little throwaway culture created.
We understood the cost-benefit analysis that the hospital accountants would have done, and knew that some contaminated products couldn’t be recycled. Still, the waste rankled.
But are we alone in this and is it just a product of our age, being the wrong side of 60 and the products of post-war parents?
No such thing as a throwaway culture
Nothing in my childhood house was thrown out, or at least nothing until it was way beyond repairing. I have vivid memories of my father dragging me to a hardware store (think before Bunnings), buying shoe leather and repairing his shoes and nailing on little pieces of metal to extend the life of the heels of his shoes. Now we search in vain for a nearby shoe repairer and often just throw the shoes away, finding them too expensive to fix.
In my childhood, if vegetables wilted in the fridge then they became the soup for the next few days. Nowadays I tend to throw things in the freezer intent on the same idea of not wasting anything.
Clearly, I am an outlier, since something like a third of all food grown around the world is thrown away, with 7.6 million tonnes of food wasted in Australia alone. That equates to roughly $2000 per household per year. A rather sobering fact in a cost-of-living crisis.
How many of you have a kitchen drawer full of items salvaged just in case? Do you keep the elastic bands that come around broccolini and asparagus spears? Do you recycle bits of string and ribbons to lace around presents to give them that funky look?
Wrap it up
And what about wrapping paper and that lovely tissue that surrounds presents or the beautiful glossy fancy labelled bags that accompany a special item that you have bought?
I can’t bear to throw them out and keep them again just in case they can be utilised. What about those old sheets? Do you store them in the cupboard just in case you need drop sheets for the next time you paint the walls?
I do have a thing about throwing things away, a layer of guilt that clings to me as I put something in the rubbish bin, knowing it is destined for landfill. I try my best to recycle and send items to the op shop, hoping that someone will find a use for my discarded items.
Australians are evidently one of the biggest buyers of ‘fast fashion’, the cheap clothes we wear once or twice and then throw away.
Dreadful practice
Quite a few media stories have focused on this dreadful practice, highlighting both the sheer volume of waste but also the enormous amount of energy and water that goes into producing items of clothing only to have them discarded with little thought. But changing a mindset around this practice is difficult and no doubt counter to the rules of capitalism, the mantra of make money no matter what.
Perhaps changing my ‘just in case, save it at all costs mindset is as hard to change as changing the throwaway mentality that has been promoted in the past 30 or so years.
The young have grown up with this attitude. Where is the middle ground that means we don’t hoard things we really don’t need or won’t use versus the total overconsumption of modern life?
Do you keep things ‘just in case’ or do you dislike the clutter? Why not share your thoughts in the comments section below?
