I happened to see a very depressing sight on my walk into the city recently, so I thought I would share it with you. Go with me on this; I happen to be in a sharing, caring kind of mood right now.
It was a black wheelie bin that had fallen over outside some houses and the contents were spilling out. What were those contents? A plastic child’s toy of a garage, complete with bright red ramps and parking bays. The kind of thing that is designed for kids to play with by driving their toy cars in and out, accompanied by ‘brrrmmm brrrmmm’ noises. It looked in pretty good condition to me as I walked past – as if there was nothing actually wrong with it. Yet it had been discarded, for whatever reason, into the refuse (landfill) bin. Not even the recycling bin, for what that’s worth. Now I do understand, there may have been many reasons why it had been thrown out like this, and I accept that without knowing what the real one was, I was simply a passer-by who was jumping to a conclusion. But as I say, go with me on this; the conclusion I jumped to was one that I found very depressing.
And what was that conclusion? It was that a perfectly good toy had been thrown away to landfill – which symbolised to me the way we have become such a throwaway consumer society. Particularly with toys after Christmas. And why was that depressing? Because it shows just how damaging our actions are for the environment, and how badly we are cocking things up for future generations.
I know I am not saying anything new here (when do I ever?), but what that sight demonstrated to me was the madness of the consumer model when it comes to playthings for kids. Think about it. We import cheap plastic toys from China to give to our children, who play with them for a short while, until they get bored (or the batteries run out), then the item gets put in a cupboard and forgotten. Until eventually, sooner or later, it gets thrown into the wheelie bin, to be taken to landfill. Where it will fester un-decomposed, for generation after generation. And when it does finally decompose, I presume it will release billions of micro-plastic particles into the soil / atmosphere / oceans – all of which will seriously bugger up the environment and the biodiversity of the planet.
What possible excuse could we give to the future generations whose lives and environment we are blighting by the mountains of such plastic toys (not to mention the oceans of microplastics and wrappers we are bequeathing to the fish)? How can we possibly justify to them that what we were doing has any validity?
Imagine what we would say if a ‘future generations person’ popped back through a time-portal to find out what the heck is going on.
“You make millions of plastic toys,” she says, “which you ship half way round the world (poisoning the atmosphere right there), put in colourful boxes and advertise on TV, so the kids pester their parents (or a made-up character in a red suit), to buy them for Christmas. Sooner or later the toy is discarded, to be buried in landfill under thousands of other such items, where it stays for hundreds or thousands of years like an environmental time-bomb, until we come along and have to deal with it. It sounds pretty dumb to me.”
“No listen,” we reply, “it’s actually a really good idea. Not only do we get to see happy little faces on Christmas morning as they tear off the wrapping, but it also helps give us this amazing thing called ‘economic growth’, which means there’s more and more money in the system.”
“So everyone can buy more and more throwaway goods?”
“Well, not everyone – there are lots of people who can’t afford to heat their homes or buy food, but that’s another topic for another time…. Anyway, it’s important we keep the economy growing, and making plastic toys is just one of the millions of ways we can do this.”
“And the environment is just an unfortunate collateral victim,” she observes.
“Absolutely. What’s your problem with that?”
“The fact that we now have to deal with your mountain of toxic plastic waste.”
“But,” we say, “you can do so in the happy knowledge that not only did it keep our kids amused for a short while, it was also a vital part of our constant drive for economic growth.”
I think we can all imagine what her response will be to that.
If you’d like to discover more of my writing, please start with The Witchfnder’s Well.
Click on the pictures above to see on Amazon.