Interesting story from Blessed Quietness Journal
http://www.blessedquietness.com/yarn/living_without_the_greens.htm
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”
The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn’t do the green thing back then.
We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day....
Not even mentioning that milk was delievered instead of each homeowner making a separate trip to the store.
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2 comments:
Things do swing back. We now order our (local) meat online and it gets delivered (in a recycled chilli bag) once a fortnight (or week if we like).
We can also order groceries like that and boxes of fruit and veg (except I like to choose our own.
Now to work on those milk bottles.....
viv in nz
I think they are swinging back now because we are asking for such things.
I think the glass bottles were done away with because they were somewhat more expensive than the cardboard, and the cardboard did not need an expensive recycling process.
The throw-away culture came into being, perhaps, because of higher profits: the costs of processing old containers was swapped over onto the consumers themselves in their roles as tax-payers of the locality which had to maintain a dump site.
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