I think this is the correct place for this, but feel free to move it if not:
When getting to the checkout at the shop, the young girl on the till suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags, because plastic bags are not good for the environment. The woman apologized to the young girl and explained, "We didn't have this 'green thing' back in my earlier days."
The young girl responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations." The older lady said that she was right, our generation didn't have the "green thing" in its day.
But the older lady went on to explain:
"Back then, we returned milk, fizzy drink and beer bottles to the shop. The shop then sent them back to the company to be washed and sterilised and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over, so they were recycled properly."
“Grocery shops put our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household rubbish bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.”
“We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in shops or office building. We walked to the grocery shop and didn't climb into a car every time we had to go two streets away.”
But she was right. We didn't have the "green thing" in our day.
“Back then we washed the baby's nappies because we didn't have the throw away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 3kw every hour. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Children got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.”
“Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house, not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of Hampshire. In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packed a fragile item to send in the post, we used screwed up old newspapers to protect it, not styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. And back then, we didn't use an electric or petrol mower to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.”
“We drank from tap when we were thirsty instead of using a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.”
But we didn't have the "green thing" back then.
“Back then, people took the bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their parents into a 24-hour taxi service in the family's 4WD, which cost what a whole house did before the “green thing." We had one electrical socket in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pub or restaurant.”
Isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we older people were, just because we didn't have the "green thing" back then?
