This is the magic place where every one of us sends our unwanted waste, this is ‘away’.
I would like us all to stop using the term ‘away’ when talking about rubbish, ” just throw that away.” Nothing is ever going to go ‘away’, it will just ‘be’ somewhere else, somebody else’s problem.
Just as we have a lack of connection to our food so do we have the same disconnection to our waste. The way to address this situation is to start admitting responsibility for our waste and to scrap terms like ‘away’. We send our waste to landfill sites across the world, we would be better remembering that, each time we bin something. It gives us a realistic situation and puts the responsibility back on us.
Just simply refering to a bin as the ‘landfill bin’ instead of a wheelie or green bin, as many people in my region do, you are changing your attitude to it’s purpose. When you start using the term landfill bin it is amazing how your attitude to what you throw away changes, I am less happy to just discard something, just by simply changing the name.
The Kale Yard 
Nice. But I see a bit of a disconnect between this and your complaints about the littering bin man the other day.
Whenever I hear complaints about someone littering rather than using the bin I always have to hold back from saying that actually I think we’d be better off if there weren’t any bins in the first place.
If we all had to live in our own filth and deal with the consequences of our waste in our own immediate surroundings maybe we’d have an incentive to avoid buying and producing so much non-degradable crap. It’s kind of hard for most of us to imagine the scale of the landfill problem because we never actually see it. But just imagine if we had to live with it all lining the gutters in our streets and building up in piles in our back gardens. I know it’s a bit extreme but I say lets bin the bins and do away with away! Lets live in our own filthy waste. 😉
Um..
Completely agree with that. It’s all about thinking about things differently isn’t it? As opposed to burying our heads in the sand (or perhaps more appropriately -the landfill…)
Yes thats a bit extreme, but I think if they cut collections down to once a month, even, it would have the same effect, without the disease, rats and public disorder 🙂
I’ve added another photo as I think we are all familiar with a bin lorry, but how many times have we seen one emptied, we are so used to filling bins and adding to waste.
Tom I know that this is a bigger issue but as I always say you have to start small and slowly, just a simple change in term can cause great effects. I’m trying to change routine acceptable behaviour.
Yes I know. 😉 In fact my comment was meant to be a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but maybe I didn’t pull it off quite right in the medium of text. I do agree with it in principle though.
Start small at the supermarket checkout. Responsible shoppers take their own re-usable non-plastic bags ‘to’ the supermarket to pack their items. Plastic supermarket bags not used can’t be taken ‘away’ to be added to their household waste-bins. Lessen the amount of flimsy white plastic rubbish sent ‘away’ to be dumped in nature’s backyard. Good point about connections made with vocabulary used to name things. ‘Landfill bin’ passively suggests land needs to be ‘filled’.
Hey there. Great post. I hadn’t really considered the terms we use to conveniently forget about the by-products of our material driven lives. But you’re right, it is important because it’s embedded in our thinking. This needs to be turned around.
we refer to ours as the landfill bin,if we have something that is beyond repair or use I often say its going to have to be buried in the ground :O(
The smalls hear the landfill lorry coming & look up & I say thats all the things going off to be buried in the ground & whislt they are too small to understand,one day they will feel as solumn at the thought of that as I do.
What really strikes me as well is that millions of folk work jobs they hate in order to buy things they sent to landfill??? they buy too much food in too much packagin & half of that gets thrown not composted,they see adverts on telly saying THIS IS THE NEW LOOK so out they rush & change curtains & sofas & beds & kitchens & dont even go there on clothes gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Everything you buy you have had to work to earn the money for.
That needs repeating again & again & again because I know when I buy something I try to buy it with a view to having it for an extremely long time,I dont want to send it to be buried a hole next year because its cost me money to obtain the bally thing.
I increasingly find myself wanting less & less…..
Yeah, i’ve also been thinking a lot about the way things are produced these days. When the technology to create products has exceeded any other point in history we are left with goods that break quicker than ever before. Things are not made to withstand use because those who create them are driven by financial greed. They get payed the big bucks designing stuff to end up in landfill.
thanks for all the comments I’ve been away for a few days will reply soon.