A few months ago I watched the ABCs War on Waste. Twice actually. I've always been careful with recycling, trying to be responsible, but this three part series was eye opening in so many ways.
Seemingly simple objects such as bananas are subject to so many rules. The supermarkets have strict size and shape guidelines to make our bananas uniform. The most common banana, the Cavendish, can't be too straight, while the Lady Fingers can't be too bendy. Neither can be too long, or too short. Of course bananas don't know this and many bananas are rejected, and never sold by the growers resulting in literal banana mountains of waste.
It was completely shocking to me to see teenage girls who only wear clothing once! Who do they think they are? They are certainly not Kardashians. It is difficult I guess where weekly magazines will often ridicule, or at least point out, when celebrities wear the same piece of clothing more than once. It never occurred to me though that "regular" people would take that on though.
The real game changer for me though was the notion of soft plastic recycling. I'd never really heard of this before. I knew that you could take supermarket plastic bags back to special bins at the supermarket for recycling, and did that when I needed to, but I had no idea that Coles particularly was running a scheme called Redcycle. It's fantastic and a great way to keep soft plastics out of our oceans, rivers and landfill. Soft plastics are most dangerous to marine life, a floating piece of glad wrap or plastic bag looks just like a jelly blubber and lots of animal species will try to eat it.
My Coles supermarket had a nondescript green bin, which now post War on Waste has a new sticker proclaiming the full purpose.
I've taken to soft plastic recycling with such gusto, it's pretty much become a new hobby. Of course it is more important to try and avoid plastic use in the first place, rather than just recycle. The plastic we recycle is sent to China by boat, at tremendous cost, and incredible use of resources.
War on Waste is still available on iView until 18 Jan 2018.
The booklets thought we were recycling Nazi's before this program - they now refer to that time as the good old days!! We've also started soft plastic recycling despite some of the disturbing info about what the supermarkets actually do with it. We have to try...& judging by how quickly the bin fills up at Woolies, I'd have to say we're not the only ones who hope so too & want to do their bit.
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