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Too good to throw away

“THIS is the yoghurt tub cupboard,” I said to my nephew, who had joined us for Sunday lunch. I’d opened the cupboard to get something to whip cream in, and felt I had to explain the neat piles of nested, identical tubs and nested, identical plastic lids.

My husband adores Greek yoghurt, plain, no sugar, no fruit, with live cultures, and there’s just one local brand that does it for him. He’ll eat it for breakfast, lunch, and, if no better option is on offer, for supper. I sometimes think that if he was left alone on a grassy desert island with a yoghurt culture and a milch cow, he’d still be fit and healthy a year later (as would the cow).

We buy it from a veggie store close to home, in bulk: three to four large tubs at a time. But when he’s scraped a tub clean, it seemed wrong somehow to throw a useable plastic container away. So I washed them and stored them. Sometimes we’d find a use for one, but in the main, they got stored faster than we could use them. Till one day, as I tried to force yet another tub into the cupboard, I panted, “We have to start throwing these things away, you know!”

For a while, I also collected those firm plastic punnets in which they pack things like mushrooms and aubergines. It seemed sinful to me to not find another use for something that had barely been touched – mushrooms are grown in compost so clean it’s virtually antiseptic; aubergines have to get really vrot before their tough skin gives way. But my collection just became another pile of dust magnets.

Then I developed an obsession with those little ties that they put around plastic sacks containing bread, tomatoes or naartjies. There’s a small pile on top of the microwave as I write, a mute reminder of my question: why can’t these be reused?

And now I have another question. I was in the pharmacy yesterday to buy something over the counter which I had to ask for (is it schedule one and two?) and had to be recorded on the computer. Then it had to be put in a little cage, just like a prescription medicine, and sealed with a plastic tie.

Five metres away, the cashier used her scissors to cut through the little tie and chuck it away. Another tiny fragment of plastic destined, I imagine, for the dump. Why not use something more durable, which can be reused many times? Something easily recyclable, like a little metal lock? Why are we such terribly wasteful consumers, at every point in the value chain?

I suppose my history makes me a touch more aware of waste than my urban counterparts. I grew up on farms; there was no big truck that roared round on Fridays, with daredevil men hanging off it like free-climbers on the North Face, to upend the rubbish bin into the yawning truck’s maw and move on, leaving a scattering of potato peels and the unmistakeable whiff of rotting organic matter in their wake.

Instead, we had a fire pit. Once a week, my dad would fill the pit with anything that wouldn’t quickly decompose and burn it. And when I think back, there was remarkably little that went into the pit, compared to the average household today.

We bought groceries at a store in town which measured out the flour and beans from huge containers or hessian sacks into paper packets. The butcher wrapped our meat in a neat parcel of brown paper – there was no need for polystyrene punnets and plastic wrap.

Our milk arrived in an actual milk churn, battered from years of use. (Yes, this was all still going on in small-town South Africa even as Raymond Ackerman opened gleaming, spanking new supermarkets for urban householders.)

Later, in town, it arrived in glass bottles which we had to wash and leave at the gate to be replaced with full bottles.

Now we buy it in plastic bottles that land up on the dump. And plastic is often made from petroleum, isn’t it? Which used to seem like a never-ending resource, but is now looking a little more finite: “If we step back and acknowledge that the shale oil phenomenon will be over in a couple of years and that oil production is dropping in the rest of the world, then we have to expect that the remainder of the peak oil story will play out shortly.

"The impact of shrinking global oil production, which has been on hold for nearly a decade, will appear. Prices will go much higher; this time with lowered expectations that more oil will be produced as prices go higher. The great recession, which has never really gone away for most, will return with renewed vigour and all that it implies.” (Oil Price, September 24 2014.)

Plastic is such a useful substance, it seems a shame to waste it on inessentials. It also seems a shame not to simply wash and reuse perfectly useful things like my tubs – by far the most energy-efficient solution, surely? Can anyone tell me if there is any demand for items like this?

Meantime, I’ve found out where to take all my plastic for recycling, at least, by clicking on www.petco.co.za.

 - Fin24

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
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