Wasting away
For The Chaser's Craig Reucassel, sifting through bins for his new TV series on rubbish made him realise why we must wage war on waste.
In Australia, our waste is growing each year at twice the rate of our population. As goods have become cheaper, they’ve lost value to many of us, so we tend to just throw them away and get a new one. It’s a lot easier than repairing. And who needs to wear a shirt 100 times if it only costs 10 bucks? I wonder if we could see the energy, water and chemicals that go into making us a simple shirt, whether we’d be so quick to throw it out because we’d given it a few wears.
A banana tree, for instance, grows for nine months to bring us fruit. But if the fruit is too big or small, or not curved the right way to meet cosmetic standards, then it’s often thrown away on the farm. When we visited banana farms in North Queensland, we saw it happen and it is very confronting to see so much edible food thrown away.
For a city slicker, to see the effort that goes into bringing our food to us is an eye-opener. After months of tending to the banana trees, the next job falls to the “humper”, a job that sounds like it only exists in Hollywood.
They use long scythe-like blades to cut the bananas from the trees, then carry them on their shoulders to the tractor. Watching on, it seemed doable, though when I was barely able to carry the bananas I sank into the mud and, like many my age, realised my humping days were well past. This goes on for nine hours a day in the pouring rain or blaring sun to bring us bananas – though it seems far from our mind when we pick over them in the supermarket and reject any with a tiny blemish. As one farmer told me, “That’s how they grow, you can’t change that, it’s nature”.
So instead, it’s up to us to change our pickiness, and it’s up to the shops to give us the choice, because otherwise the food is chucked on the farm.
Fashion was a shock – textiles are one of our fastest growing waste streams. If your favourite store brings out new ranges every few weeks, instead of few months, there’s more pressure to buy. But here I’m ahead of the curve. Being unfashionable and wearing your clothes till they fall off you is good for two things – reducing waste and occasionally getting offered money at bus stops.
During the show, I got the unique although not sought after opportunity to sort through the rubbish bins of 10 families. Naturally, we filmed this on a stinking hot summer day in a windowless and airless garage. It stank. A lot. Not only was there lots of food and things that should have been recycled, but the plastic bags and packaging we pulled out shocked everyone. It turns out that in some states supermarkets charge for plastic bags and so many more people reuse there. And short of stapling reusable bags to your hands, it just takes us all changing our habits to ensure there is less plastic going into the ground, or worse still, the sea, where it is eaten by fish and birds.
The average NSW family throws away $3800 worth of food a year. All those fruit and vegetable crisper clean-outs can really add up. Yet the journey wasn’t all depressing. Amazing charities such as Foodbank and OzHarvest divert food from landfill into the hands of people who, despite Australia’s wealth, struggle to feed themselves.
There’s still a long way to go. Some of it is just a change of habit. As a three-cup-a-day coffee fiend, I haven’t used a disposable cup in months. I can’t kick the coffee, but at least I’ve been able to fix my other bad habits.
The average NSW family throws away $3800 worth of food a year.”