Throwaway living

In 1955, Life Magazine ran a cover celebrating “Throwaway living” – feast your eyes:

At the time, it must have been revolutionary. No more washing up! Much of the stuff in this photo probably still exists somewhere.

I’m no hypocrite – until about 12 years ago when I started hoarding my takeaway coffee cups with grand plans of starting a mini plant wall in my office (never happened), I fully embraced the throwaway culture. Still do to a degree.

These days, without catastrophising too much, I think about how the kids in our family will have to deal with the clean up from our choices today. It’s just one coffee. Just one takeaway lunch container. Just one batch of shitty promotional drink bottles.

My dear late mumma was 5 years old when that photo above was taken… Had they known back then that someday, their kids and grandkids would be dealing with a backlog of waste that mostly can’t be shifted, and is growing by the day, I wonder if the embrace would’ve been so joyous.

Our attitudes are slowly shifting from throwaway living to reusable and even regenerative living… Some areas of life have even reached dont-buy-at-all living.

But plenty of throwaway still exists. While I appreciate the rejoicing in the photo was kinda appropriate for the time, and it made me laugh when I saw it, it still feels weird looking at it.

Keen to know if it’s stirred anything up for you. For me, sometime in December I started thinking it was time for a plastic detox, which is really hard…

…but this has given it a serious jolt.