Have you ever despaired at the huge amount of rubbish you throw out every day? At the end of each shopping trip, almost as much as what finishes up in the pantry and the fridge goes as wasteful wrapping and packaging into the oh-so-euphemistically-called recycle bin.
It's become such a convenient "out of sight, out of mind" affair that we seem to forget that it wasn't always so. As I boy I used to go shopping for my mother with a string-bag full of used brown paper "Tüten" and empty glass containers which the grocer refilled with sugar, flour or jam. We even had a battered old aluminium can in which we carried the milk. Very little was prepackaged in those days, and even the few bottles that were thrown out had so much deposit ("Pfand" in German) on them that eager boys hunted them down for their pocket-money.
With so little thrown away, garbage collection (or German "Müllabfuhr"; are you taking notes? I shall be asking questions later) was not on the industrial scale it is today. Nor was it the "one-man-show" it is today. Then the garbage truck was manned by five men: the driver who set the pace, and one man who ran ahead to roll the (heavy solid metal) bins to the kerbside, two who rode the footplates on the back of the truck and heaved the bins up to the gaping hole and dropped them back empty, and one who rolled them back to the house, all done at a constant trot.
As boys we used to run alongside the truck and wound up breathless just from watching them as they twirled and twisted the heavy bins. They wore heavy leather aprons and a specially designed leather flap on the left hand to protect their palm which gripped the raised knob on top of the lid while with their right hand they spun the bin around and around.
So much for the "mechanics" of it but here's the one thing: we lived in a housing complex of some fifty families (that's mum and dad with on average three or four children; we were step-mum and dad and seven children but I won't even go there!) with just one "Müllhalle" (garbage room) which housed no more than a dozen "Mülltonnen" (garbage bins; are you still taking notes?) which were never ever full to overflowing!
Compare this to today when our recycle bin - and every neighbours', too - is full to overflowing by the time it gets collected. Look, I am no David Attenborough nor a David Suzuki but I think something has to give, and it could simply start by not giving us all that wrapping and packaging.
