It's garbage time

Well, I am usually as concerned with our environment as anyone else, but this is really an outrage. I have just read in the morning paper about some poor guy in England that got fined for a hundred pounds and charged with a criminal case because he threw out too much garbage and the lid of his garbage bin could not be close leaving an 8 cm gap.

Excuse me? What is exactly this guys fault?

You see, the problem is, me, you and any other average person does not, strictly speaking, produce garbage. The companies and corporations that sell us their products do, both directly and indirectly.

Indirectly, they have been using millions of dollars worth of expensive paint and air time over dozens of years to drill our brains so we buy their beloved products as often as possible. To lessen our doubts, they have made those products as unreliable as the law would let them and shortened their life spans to last less than a minute after the warranty period. They wrapped those products with overly expensive and redundant packaging, just to make them take more shelf space and be more "attractive" to the consumer as if we were butterflies. They have wasted gazillions of fuel transporting them from one place to another just to increase their profit.

But never mind that. Directly, the corporations create tons of garbage for every tiny little product they sell. You open a huge plastic box, just to get out a tiny media player you have just bought. You throw the box away, along with the one hundred page instruction manual in every european language other than English (sorry rainforest). Oh yes, and the stupid leaflet explaining that this device does not cause cancer and interfere with the radio, aha, and the additional packaging for the headphones and the cable and we are done. Oh wait, I have also bought some cookies. It's eight cookies in a plastic container with four sections (two cookies in each) wrapped in the colorful tin foil, out into the garbage you go. Wait, what's that? A Ferrero - Rocher, a present from my wife, yummy. I will just open the big and rigid plastic box, and get them out of the plastic piece holding each chocolate and unwrap it. Here that's it.

Oh my god, no. All this shit does not fit into my garbage. What do I do? They will fine me and if I throw it in the wrong can they will hunt me down. Wait, the candy box has the recyclable sign, maybe it goes into there. Yes! No! It still wont fit. Why did I have to buy that watch in the metallic box that weighs so much.

I know what I should do. I should go into the supermarket with my cookie jar. I will open the cookies right there and put them directly in the jar. This might take some time, annoy some other customers and will NOT preserve the planet any better, but it will reduce the amount of MY garbage. After all, I do NOT want to buy the packaging. This way it will be supermarkets garbage now.

If you want a better planet, this is not the way to go. If you want to do something useful deal with big companies and their wasteful practices and get the hell off my back.