Recycle For Health Or reducing Waste?

Many people have a perception of what recycling is and to them it is removing plastic, cardboard, paper and other materials from their general rubbish and putting it into a different bin or bag and leaving it to the local council to remove when they empty our dustbins.

Understanding recycling and waste actually has nothing to do with waste and we have to understand the problem actually begins with commerce, commerce is where factories around the world produce consumer goods usually in third world countries paying the lowest wages to reduce the price of the goods at the cheapest price and selling them for the highest profits for their shareholders; if we also know that many of these factories are running at less than half capacity we can see there is fierce competition to produce consumer goods at the lowest prices and sell them for the highest price they can, basically by using slave labour. As this competition is now so fierce you can buy many consumer goods at rock bottom prices and these cheap prices mean the goods are of low quality and more specifically they are not designed to last, and this is the real problem.

Many years ago products were built up to a standard and that standard dictated the price, now we have a situation where quality goes out of the window and most consumer goods are built to the lowest price which means they are designed not to last so you have to replace them with new items which in most cases means you buy new items at cheap prices, but why? many years you could buy a consumer item such as a toaster and you could guarantee it would last 10 years, today you would be lucky if it lasts 3 years, and as you can buy toasters from as little as £10 meaning they are selling 3 toasters instead of 1 toaster every 10 years. Next we have the bling factor, many of these companies use psychology to sell a product, you complain about the lack of quality of a product and a salesperson retorts, well, we do it in 25 colours so it matches your kitchen, or some similar remark; this assumes you change your kitchen every 3 years and are one of the guillable bling led consumers spending money because you are stupid enough to do so.

We can look at an example of this, the fashion moved to women buying anything pink, they bought pink because they were told it was the "in colour" and when the market for pink clothing became flooded they began to call it man pink and the guillable fashion conscious men with more money than sense bought pink products solely on two words "man pink", what fools, pink has always been a feminine colour and now men are wearing it because they are silly enough to believe two words; yet those producing pink goods are selling any surplus or overproduced goods and laughing all the way to the bank.

If we leave the la la land of bling and come back to the world of common sense we see anything up to 40% of food that is purchased goes to waste and is thrown away which costs you (through your local council) the cost of collecting it and disposing of it when your dustbin men come and collect your bin. What would a gardener do? in reality they take their produce and the wife leaves out what they need and they store the rest and freeze, bottle, or even pickle it to preserve it for many months, so why dont you do the same as you know how much food you eat and what you wont eat so simply freeze it and it will last for several months and not go into your dustbin and you have recycled it. If you grow your own food you may like salad leaves, they are currently popular and expensive for what they are, but you can eat the leaves of many plants, so if you pull beetroot or carrots from the ground you can add the leaves of beetroot and carrots to your mixed salad and reduce your waste; you can put all your old peelings into a compost heap and turn them into compost. As we can see there are lots of simple ways to reduce food waste and if you freeze that loaf of bread with a couple of days date left on it, eat more leaves of plants or food you buy, or simply freeze food you are not going to eat before its expiry date, you have saved a lot of waste and you still have food in your freezer available to eat and not have to buy more to replace it.

Cars are possibly the second most expensive commodity we purchase in our lives, second only to our homes, so can we recycle here? yes is the simple answer. Most people fall for the bling element and want the very latest registration plate to provide a superficial illusion of wealth, again if we take the bling element out of the equation we can reduce the number of new cars being built. Cars depreciate at an alarming rate and as soon as a purchaser of a new car leaves the showroon in their new car its value drops; the depreciation element of a new car is the killer and most new cars drop most of their value in the first two years, others may take a little longer.
If you intend buying a new car you either pay cash, or as most people do, take out some form of credit and end up paying a lot more back over and above the value of the depreciating car, and I picked a family salooncar totally at random and it was priced at £20,000 new after haggling, after looking at the price guides it depreciated by 10,000 or half in its first two years, now this puts a different slant on things. Instead of buying a new car for £20,000 you can buy the same car at two years old for half price, this vehicle will give good service and as most manufacturers offer a standard 3 year warranty you still have a years warranty on the vehicle and most cars should give you five years of good service, and that £10,000 you save will buy you a good private plate if you are so bling oriented, £10,000 is better sitting in your pocket rather than paying interest on a loan, and if you haven't got £20,000 to begin with and have saved only £10,000 you know you can still buy a decent car.

There are many other things we can do to recycle things, you can go to night classes and learn basic electronics, now almost every electronocally controlled device in your home becomes fair game for you to repair, you can repair anything from a toaster to a washing machine and as most electronic components cost pennies you can repair an appliance instead of throwing it away. If you have basic woodworking.DIY skills you can repair anything from a wooden chair to a wooden fence, you dont need to go and buy a set of 6 chairs when one is broken and you can repair it, in short the more things you can repair means its one less new thing being bought, and you can save a fortune in the process.