My mum is a zero-waste icon – she made us drink squash from old yoghurt pots | Adrian Chiles
A charity proposes that we bring our own plastic containers when we buy takeaway food. I couldn’t agree more. My mother taught us that there is no such thing as single-use anything
Some ideas are so obvious that it can only be their very obviousness that has stopped them being thought of before. A charity called Hubbub suggests that we take our own plastic containers along when we buy takeaway food. To incentivise us, we should get a discount on the food we buy. I agree with every aspect of this, other than that I personally wouldn’t want a discount. Because I would be only too happy to show off my absolutely world-class Tupperware collection on a daily basis. This is the moment I have been waiting for. I will be very pleased to pass on my discount to the customer behind me in the queue. They will want the money to buy themselves some better containers, for once they’ve seen mine, their whole bodies will throb with envy.
I go back a long way with plastics. My mum is from Zagreb, born and raised in what was the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, where plastic products were cherished. The notion of single-use plastic – single-use anything, for that matter – didn’t really exist. As the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić points out in her masterpiece, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, nobody had any choice but to be environmentally sound: everything had to be recycled or, more accurately, re-used.