Throw Away Society – The Brief & Inaccurate History of Conservation!

I was dropping my youngest son, Charlie off at day care the other day. They have this system whereby parents are asked to sort their food for each day into morning, lunch & afternoon. They also provide brown paper lunch bags for the parents to use so they don’t need to bring 3 different lunch boxes for each day. At the end of the day, the paper bags with the children’s names are returned home with the child to be re-used the next day. Not 100% the most environmental solution, but it’s “ok”.

I noticed on this particular day that one of the parents had bought in a large packet of brown bags and left them on the bench where the sorting of said lunches goes on. She had written a note to the room teacher which read “I thought these might come in handy for you… no need to recycle “Johnny’s” bags each day as we provide fresh ones every evening”. Wait…let me check the calendar … it is 2009, isn’t it? Surely by now everyone “gets” that the recycling of the bag is not just to save a few cents. I stood there for a few minutes and read the note several times trying to work out where I had read wrong, but nope. I looked up, surveyed the surroundings…no one is wearing flairs, no beehive hairdos I haven’t been sucked into some bizarre time warp and landed in 1967. No, it’s just a glaring case of environmental stupidity.

For a long time there, we got “shamed” into being environmentally responsible. We didn’t really 100% believe the hype that the world would end if we didn’t stop throwing polystyrene Macca’s boxes out the car window, but there were some pretty loud and downright annoying activists throughout the 90s that would make you feel damned uncomfortable if you weren’t recycling or “doing the right thing”. It just started becoming easier to conform, you got yelled at less, and there was a chance green might become “cool”.

Waddaya know, by the turn of the millennium green was the new black and if you weren’t wearing it because you really believed in it, the peer pressure from your children became so overwhelming that you had no choice but to recycle as they preached what they started learning in school… and really it’s just grown from there. So how did people like “Johnny’s Mum” fall through the cracks, and what future for their children? Surely this can’t be common? Or am I so insulated in my little green cocoon that I’m ignorant to the facts?

The funny part about recycling is that it’s really nothing new! I remember my Mum once relaying a story to me of how my Grandma (who was my absolute idol, love & inspiration) used to cut up Mum’s older brothers pants when they had outgrown them, to make slacks for her. The boys were bigger than my Mum so Gran could cut out a new pair in a completely different style, by simply unpicking the original and starting again.

My Grandma raised 4 children in war times, a lot of the time on her own as my Granddad worked on the railways during the war and was away. She didn’t have the luxury of a washer & dryer, or even a fridge. Times were tough but she managed. I guess in the 40’s recycling to save the world probably never crossed their minds, but they recycled out of necessity and the things my Grandmother made in her life would make you weep. Stunning work! When her couch & Jason recliners became threadbare she must have been in her 70s, but the mechanics were fine and although she could probably have afforded a new one at that stage of life, for her that wasn’t an option. Instead she went out and bought a beautiful upholstery fabric and proceeded to work out how to disassemble those chairs, reupholster them by hand and put them back together.

My Grandma passed away some years ago, but she’s still my go-to woman when things get tough. Whenever I’m whiney, my back hurts, my hands cramp… I think of this amazing woman and although she never would have told me to “suck it up” this is what I tell myself. I came to a difficult point this week whilst cutting fabric – pillowcases made by my Grandma for my “glory box”. Most of them I’ve had since I was 8 years old – most of them have rarely been used, and probably wouldn’t have been used again. Each perfectly made with intricate decorative stitching. I stopped and put down my scissors, held the soft fabric to my face and breathed in the energy of my grandmother, allowed myself a moment to remember while my tears dampened the fabric and then returned to cutting. She wouldn’t have had any hesitation in doing the same.

I miss you Grandma… and I can’t get your bloody fancy stitches undone. I know you’re laughing at me, I can hear you LOL!