Linda Hall: All tied up in packaging

Linda Hall, Assistant Editor, Hawke's Bay Today.

Welcome to 2017. I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year.

I had a great Christmas Day and a very quiet New Year.

I also had some time off which was so relaxing.

I ate too much but I did go for a walk almost every morning. Friday is recycling day in my neighbourhood and boy was there ever some recycling.

You may have seen the photograph in Saturday's paper of a huge pile of plastic waiting to be recycled.

The story mentioned how Green Waste Solutions was pushed to its limits with the volume of plastic water containers being recycled since the Havelock North water crisis.

Sure the water crisis has seen a surge in bought water resulting in more plastic to recycle, but think back 20 years.

No one carried water bottles with them. You simply didn't see people walking around with pump bottles.

Theses days many people don't leave the house without a bottle of water - and their cellphone of course.

It is important to drink water but do we really need to carry it everywhere we go.
The other thing I noticed about recycling on Christmas Day was the packaging toys came in.

I don't remember having to ask my mother or father to extract toys from a box.
They either came without a box or if it was in one you just opened the lid and pulled it out.

Not now. I bought my youngest granddaughter a Barbie doll with Barbie scooter for Christmas.

She is doll mad.

Of course she wanted to open it straight away. Her mother spent about half an hour trying to extract the scooter and doll from the clutches of the box.

It's just unbelievable how many ties and bits of cardboard were holding it tightly in the box. There was even tape on the doll's hair for goodness sake.

Why it needed tape to hold its hair in place is beyond me.

The first thing most little girls want to do with their new dolls is touch or comb its hair.
There really was no need for three quarters of the cardboard and ties in that box. It's no wonder our landfills are overflowing.

Toys are not the only things that are over-packaged. Do we really need to buy fresh fruit and vegetables in packets all ready chopped up.

Surely people aren't that busy or lazy that they can't spend five minutes chopping vegetables.

Do we not have time to make jelly or cut and grate our own cheese? Do we really need to buy packets of crackers with more packets inside with individual servings of crackers and cheese?

I think it's a bit different with frozen vegetables - they are like a back up - for me anyway if there are no fresh vegetables in the house.

One thing that has gone the other way is men's shirts.

You can still buy business shirts in boxes but now the majority are hanging on racks - much easier. No cardboard or pins in the collar.

The trouble is people do buy pre-packaged goods all the time so the manufacturers are going to keep on doing exactly the same thing.

We recycle as much as we can, have several compost bins and recently Mr Neat was given a worm farm so all our scraps are going in there at the moment.

My New Year's resolution is to buy less packaging.

- Linda Hall is assistant editor of Hawke's Bay Today.