So I was covering the home-made pizza I made last night to put in the fridge for tomorrow. My partner used glad wrap and an extra plate, but I've recently started limiting the amount of glad wrap and other plastic I use, so I left it on the baking tray and covered with the chopping board I used to make the pizza (both of which I'd have to wash anyway).
Then I looked at the plastic tub from the mushrooms we'd used still on the counter top. I'd purchased them from the supermarket chopped up in a plastic tub with glad wrap on top. My partner could've used that gladwrap for his pizza plate. Or, we could have bought whole mushrooms in a paper bag. But, 100% of that plastic tub can be recycled, whereas paper can only be recycled about 70%, and I'm pretty sure that statistic goes for clean office paper, not the brown bags you throw in the same yellow bin that has someone else's greasy pizza box. Plus, those mushrooms, we'd need to chop up. I would just use this traditional method involving a sharp instrument and a chopping board (which I could later use for a second purpose: see above), but my partner would more likely use our cheap little food processor. I'm no scientist, but I assume the electricity used to chop up mushrooms for 6 seconds is probably negligible, considering we're storing food in a fridge that's maintaining really cold temperatures 24 hours a day, making pizza in our dodgy oven at 200 degrees for 30 minutes, and then putting our crockery in a dishwasher (on the eco-cycle with biodegradable powder, but still). Then again, my other options of paper recycling vs plastic recycling and 20cm of glad wrap filling up landfill were equally negligible in the scheme of things. The size of a grain of sand vs Bondi Beach.
So if you're concerned about the preservation of this world we have the privilege to walk upon how do you make these decisions?
And honestly, that fact that I actually thought about all of that not to mention write it down, is probably an indication of insanity.
So the questions remains: how much time and organisation does the average person have to plan things so technically insignificant if you consider the statistics? Then again, if everyone didn't vote because they assumed theirs was not the tipping point between one useless politician, and one slightly less useless politician, we wouldn't have a democracy.
And I'm a fan of democracy, so I'm going to embrace the insanity, start with the man in the mirror and hope this blog inspires the creation of some artwork.
