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When I was a child I would sometimes do the shopping for my Mum. Very little food was prepackaged. All dry food was sold loose, so when you asked the storekeeper for a pound of sugar he would scoop it into a paper bag and weighed it on a scale. Biscuits came in large tins and they would be put into a paper bag when purchased. Butter was in big slabs in the store and whatever you requested would then be cut from the slab and wrapped in greaseproof paper to take home.

Every household had shopping bags that lasted for years. Mostly the paper bags used by the store where made from brown paper. These were used to cover school books and exercise copies to save wear on the covers. The greaseproof paper that the butter was wrapped in was kept to line baking tins when making a tea brack or cake.

Most households grew their own vegetables as much as possible and the leaves, stalks and skin scrapings were put on the compost heap. When well rotted the compost was used when planting next years crop.

Maybe this is not the most appropriate place to mention this - but as we are talking about packaging and waste nowadays and it is a modern day problem in all sorts of ways - the packaging that annoys me most is the plastic that is used on toilet/loo rolls. When toilet rolls were invented they eliminated the use of newspaper squares that at one time did the same job.

Today, the packaging on all sorts of things is only useful for that purpose - there is almost no packaging that can be used by the household for anything else. The items that can be recycled are recycled at a further cost - more energy is used to recycle in the hope to cut down on landfill, but it is not working either. So let us all make an effort to put pressure on manufacturers to reduce or eliminate packaging when it is not necessary.

Learn more about this author, Joy Sunday.
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