View from here
Iwas brought up in a ‘make do and mend’ household. My parents had lived through the Second World War, when rationing was a stark reality, and during my childhood, nothing – absolutely nothing – went to waste. Aside from the fact that money was short – we had tins of coins on the sideboard to pay for gas, electric and other household bills – it was simply not done to throw anything away. A keen knitter and needlewoman, my mother made many of our clothes, and wet afternoons saw her darning socks, sewing buttons on shirts and mending tears in cotton dresses. Any leftover wool was saved for making dolls’ clothes or given to us as a treat to wind around circles of cardboard. Then snip, snip with the scissors and, hey presto, we had made a pom-pom!
By the time I became a homeowner for the first time in the 1980s, this frugality felt outmoded and unnecessary. In a new and modern world, it seemed, everything had become dispensable: and when something broke, rather than repair it, you just threw it away and bought another one. So much easier than fiddling around with things trying to fix them, I thought. I laughed at my mother who was still painting yogurt cartons to grow plants in and saving bits of string, paperclips, rubber bands and drawing pins in ‘the bits and pieces drawer’.
Then, gradually, like everyone else, I began to realise how reprehensible over-consumption is and the damage our wastefulness is doing to the planet. It felt shocking that we had been so ready to discard anything we didn’t want. I stopped laughing at my mother’s habits and began to emulate them. For years now, I have saved anything I can re-use – and I have an odds and ends drawer of my own.
But my garden is where I am most inventive at recycling household ‘waste’: plastic containers – bottles, tubs and cartons – become plant guards against slugs, with coloured plastic cut up to make plant labels; loo roll centres are perfect for seed sowing and then planting straight into the ground; string, raffia and the wire twists on foodstuff packets become plant ties.
Anything that will break down – apart from cooked food – goes straight into the compost bins. These are fashioned from discarded wooden pallets with squares of old carpet to cover the contents. Vegetable peelings, teabags, coffee grounds, tissues and eggshells are tossed into the kitchen caddy and transported up the garden. I add grass clippings, spent plants, soft prunings and shredded paper from our home office to the heaps, plus any uncoated cardboard
– egg boxes, loo rolls and vegetable trays – to provide aeration.
The results are best when I turn the piles frequently, mixing fresh and older material, and when I run any woody stems through the shredder first, the finely chopped pieces break down more quickly. This equal mix of brown and green – carbon from the woody stems, nitrogen from the grass clippings and spent plants – is ideal. It’s often hard to find the time to use the shredder when there seem to be so many other, more pressing tasks to do in the garden, but it really pays off.
I use my heavier-weight prunings, too: long, sappy lengths of hazel are bent into hoops for training roses and older, straight stems used for staking plants; twiggy birch and the fan-shaped branches cut from our Christmas trees are perfect for holding back floppy plants at the front of borders; while prickly holly stops mice and squirrels from digging up my bulbs and keeps our errant, teenage spaniel off newly planted areas!
I enjoy this inventive recycling and feel ashamed of myself when I cannot find a use for ‘waste’. The fact is, it would simply make so much more sense not to generate it in the first place. I despair of the shops and supermarkets still selling so much produce in unnecessary and often unrecyclable packaging. Surely, it’s time that manufacturers and retailers were called to account and forced to subscribe to a circular economy, where products are designed to be easily repairable, re-useable or recyclable?
This month sees the 14th annual Zero Waste Week
(6-10 September). The aim is to get us to think about ‘rubbish’ as a valuable resource. Check out some of the great ideas at zerowasteweek.co.uk. A paragraph on the website really made me think: “What happens when you throw something away? Away isn’t some magical place; it’s landfill, an incinerator, the bottom of the ocean or the stomach of an animal. It’s always somewhere else.” Perhaps all of us should make use of ‘back to school’ month to start learning something new: maybe then we can take more steps towards building a sustainable society where nothing is thrown ‘away’.