gobsmacked!

Justie

I'm beginning to realise how lucky I am to have grown up on a farm - we only had fortnightly rubbish collections because of the locality so had to deal with all our rubbish in ways that are now becoming common. We had seperate bins in the kitchen for compost, paper and burnable waste and another bin for stuff to go in the dustbin (mostly plastics and sometimes cooked food waste) and then boxes for recycling newspapers bottles and cans and eventually more recently plastic bottles. All paper waste and anything else that would burn went in an outdoor brazier once a month. The compost went in huge compost bins and then was used on the veg patch. When driving to the supermarket there'd be boxes of recylcing to do on the way and bags in the car for filling with shopping. And the bin men emptied the one black bin every fortnight and my mum took pride in trying to reduce how much was in it as much as possible. This meant that I grew up used to sorting waste, thinking about what went in a bin and which bin it should go into. Recycling was the norm. Reusing was preferable. All my adult life I've carried on doing this to the best of my ability and it's now transferring into cloth nappies etc as well.

If we bring our children up to see it as the norm then as Reluctant says it will become the norm... hopefully sooner rather than later.