Recycling or ‘The Green thing’ in modern terms

Back in my childhood days, we returned milk bottles, pop bottles and beer bottles to the shop and received a small amount of money for doing so. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed, sterilised and refilled, so we  could use the same bottles over and over. Grocery shops bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things. Women carried shopping bags to put the brown paper bags of groceries in. Most memorable for me was the fact that we didn’t have rubbish bags but we had galvanised metal dustbins. We used some of the brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) were not defaced by our doodling. Then we were able to personalise our books with drawings or writing on the brown paper using pencils, crayons or ink pens and even writing the name of our true love on it.

We walked up stairs because we didn’t have an escalator in every big store and office building. We walked to the grocery shop and didn’t climb into a few hundred horsepower machine every time we had to go half a mile, leaving pollution behind us.

Back then we washed the baby’s nappies, because we didn’t have the throw away kind, now used, which block drains and toilets. We had terry towelling ones which we washed and dried on a clothes line, not in an energy-burning machine. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. I personally hated hand me downs, as a boy wearing my sisters clothes was tough (joke).

Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of a wall. Our family were poor so we only had a radio. In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Polyfoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a gym to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

There were no washing machines, dishwashers or fridges because there was no electric. Our lighting ran on ‘Calor’ gas from a container, as did the ring for boiling the kettle.

We drank a glass of water from a tap, in a china cup or glass, when we were thirsty, instead of using a plastic cup or a bottle every time we had a drink. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole or a major part of a razor just because the blade got dull.

Back then, people took the bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked, instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service in the family’s £45,000 MPV or van, which cost what a whole house did before recycling. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest chip shop. Fish and chips were wrapped in newspaper and greaseproof paper and always, somehow, seemed to taste better.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have recycling back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation, such as that presented by the younger generation of today.  They think that their generation have invented recycling  What do they know??

Michael J Hill January 2019.