ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE YOUR CONVENIENCES?

ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE YOUR CONVENIENCES?

When I grew up during prehistoric times, we had a very simple approach to the collection, sorting and disposal of all of our personal garbage. Boxes, paper, and wooden refuse was burned in our coal stove for fuel, and wet waste, including food scraps, went into a “slop pail” that was dumped into an outdoor toilet. Not very sophisticated nor completely environmentally friendly, but that was how it worked. Today, we have blue, green and black plastic bins to collect almost all of our wastes and then we pay a fee to have our refuse disposed of. We even have “garbage police” to make sure we are throwing our trash into the right coloured bin. Garbage is big business, but in many ways we are only looking at the excessive garbage problem from one side of the issue. There is another aspect that we have largely ignored!

Instead of focussing exclusively on the disposal of waste materials, we need to examine and regulate all of the packaging and conveniences that the marketing world have introduced over the years that generate most of our garbage. In our condo, Darlene and I will normally fill two rubbermaid bins with disposable waste and one or two wet containers every week. Our blue and green waste consists mainly of papers or magazines, cardboard, boxes, packaging material, and plastic or glass bottles. For a small item that we purchase in a store, the item is often wrapped in plastic, placed inside a cardboard or plastic box, shrink wrapped in more plastic and then taken home in a plastic bag. Our society has become packaged to death. We need to eliminate 90% of the excessive packaging that inundates our world.

We are an over packaging society for basically one reason: convenience! We do not want to carry our own packaging materials when we go shopping. In many European and Asian countries people shop daily (inconvenient) for produce and groceries using mesh, net or cloth bags. If it is not such a hardship for millions of people to shop for groceries this way, why is it for us? (inconvenient). In Poland, we were often exposed to barrels of pickles or sauerkraut to dig out as much as we wanted, similar to the concept of the Bulk Barns that sell many dry baking supplies and candy in Calgary. People would have to plan ahead for their shopping trips and also bring containers for any wet or liquid materials they may wish to purchase from a bulk store. (inconvenient).

And the questions just go on. Do we need individual yoghurt containers because it is too inconvenient to spoon out a portion from a litre container? Beverages do not need individual bottles: they would be carried in larger jugs! How often do you buy a product in an oversized box and when you open the lid the container is only half full? Do we need two steaks prepackaged in styrofoam and plastic wrap or could we just have the butcher cut two for us? Think of all of the products we use that are unnecessarily packaged for our convenience!

Our societal demands for convenience are the root cause of much of the excessive packaging that has led us to our garbage accumulation dilemma. I know that less packaging would lead to the need for more employees in many businesses (a good thing, I think) and added salaries and costs to a distributer. If the tradeoff is spending millions or billions of dollars less, on the entire garbage collection and disposal industry, might it not be worth it to try to regulate the front end of the garbage issue by minimizing packaging?

I fear however, that I am just whistling in the wind, as we have likely become too conditioned to having our convenience needs met to reverse direction now. On that note, I shall remove and enjoy my saran wrapped muffin from its plastic box, pop a Keurig coffee pod into the coffee maker, get two little plastic milk containers and a single pack of sugar, and enjoy the rest of my morning!