Dunk's Daily Blog

New Year resolutions are not the easiest things to come up with at the best of times - take News Year's Day for instance. It might only be mid August, but it's neither too early nor late to be considering one's well-meant statements of intention.

It came to me as I woke, as usual, to some breakfast news. GMTV were running an item on wasteful packaging. The jolly reporter stood amidst two equally laden supermarket trolleys - one difference: unnecessary external packing had been removed from trolley 'B'. The difference in bulk was visually remarkable - from mountain to molehill.

Thinking about it myself, in recent years I have noticed the need to take the bin out far more regularly than previous. I haven't got that much fatter over the period, so could conclude a link with an increase in packaging. Why do we need it and at what cost? It's pathetic purpose is to encourage us gullible consumers to consume more, afterwhich it fills landfills for an eternity. Pathetic indeed. Why the cardboard box around the toothpaste? The oven-ready meal? The half-dozen biscuits? The list is as inexhaustible as we believe the earth's resources to be.

As a liberal with a small 'L', I've always found my environmental concerns too ... inconvenient to put into practice. Not so this time. "Would you like a bag with that?" asked the checkout girl of me yesterday. "What - with a can of coke and a pack of chewing-gum? No thank YOU!" my assertive reply. As Jack Johnson says, we gotta 'reduce, re-use, re-cycle'. Now there's some trash talk!