Had a chat with a retiree at the bus stop that stuck with me

I was waiting for the 42 bus last Tuesday and an older guy named Frank started talking about how he used to refill his own glass milk bottles in the 70s... no plastic, no waste. He pointed at the recycling bin on the corner and said "we've been trying to fix what we broke for 50 years." Made me wonder if we're ever gonna get back to that kind of simple system... has anyone else met someone who made them rethink their daily habits?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_vera25d ago

Frank makes a nice point but I think he's romanticizing the past a little too much. Those glass bottles had to be washed with hot water and soap, which used energy and chemicals, and the trucks that picked them up still ran on gas. The 70s had plenty of their own pollution problems too, like leaded gas and smog. We're not just "trying to fix what we broke" we're trying to do something way harder - building a system that works for 8 billion people instead of 3 billion. Glass bottles work great for a small town but try scaling that to a whole city of apartment dwellers who don't have space for bottle crates. I'd rather focus on improving what we have now instead of pretending there was some perfect old way we can just go back to.

fiona_scott4425d ago

The "scale to 8 billion people" bit you said @the_vera is EXACTLY what people miss. Everyone wants to act like we can just copy-paste the 1950s, but we had like a third of the people and way less stuff per person. Even if everyone used glass bottles, where are we putting all the CRATES in cities where rent is 2000 dollars for a studio?