Waste isn’t waste until we waste it.
It sounds rather obvious I know. But the more I think about this phrase, the more I realise just how much we waste. When that last bit of dinner is sitting uselessly in the pan and it’s too little to make a whole extra meal, but too much to warrant throwing away. Or when there’s still a little bit of soap sitting infuriatingly at the bottom of the bottle – just out of reach of the pump. What is one to do? These conundrums happen frequently, and it’s easy to dismiss them as just some of life’s inevitable draw backs – unfortunate but unavoidable waste. In many ways you might be right. There are of course some things that we just can’t use anymore. But on occasions, I see something thrown away without a second thought, and I wonder; is waste becoming trivial?
I think it’s important to mention that I do not mean to discredit anyone by asking this question - a lot of us try very hard when it comes to using things until the very end of their useful lives. But there are elements of our routine that seem so entrenched in the perennial cycle of ‘make things, use them and then throw them away’ that I cannot help but wonder if we have become numb to the idea the earth has a finite amount of resources.
When you step out of your day to day life for a moment, and survey the amount of times you reach over to consign something to the dingy depths of the dustbin, then it becomes alarmingly evident that many of the resources we use everyday are destined to be wasted. From the very day your plastic water bottle was made, it had only one end destination – the bin (and probably landfill after that). So perhaps we need to re-evaluate the way we think about (or don’t think about) what we waste. Every time we find ourselves hovering hesitantly over the bin thinking, ‘could this be used again?’ I propose we think carefully about the response. Sometimes, undoubtedly the answer will be 'no, I can't use this again', but it most certainly is not the only option.
Tamsin Hollyman, Yr12
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