Is it me or were we more enviromentally friendly in the 80's (and before)

[NaughtToThreeSadOnions]

( Delibrately put in chat rather than AIBU) sort of inspired by the stop flying thread but other threads in resent weeks i've kindcof been thinking this the last while.

When i was growing up we had milk in glass bottles that we had to wash and return to be reused delivered by local milkman in an electric cart. Yes we can now get milk and more but very very few people do use this service mostly its the dreaded plastic bottle from the supermarket.

We certuanly had the pop man (ok i think that was fairly rare in the 80's but maybe not in the 70's) who'd gove ypu a percentage back for returning the glass bottle rather than the big plastic bottles from the supermarket

Talking of supermarkets, i don't really remember plastic bags we used to put every thing back in our trolley and pack it in cardboard boxes at the packing self in finefare anyway. Me and my brother always used to race to the box pile to find the suitable box. See the lidl/aldi style is nothing new is it. That was kust going to the supermarket people have just forgotten because we got used to being given handfulls of plastic bags at the checkout.

I remember my respite career taking fabric shopping bags with her that were kept by the front door. So did my nan so that might have been old fashioned then but i'm sure they weren't the only ones to do it.

Meat was more expensive and you generally shopped at the local butchers.

Holidays at the old beach holday resorts were just as accptable as a holiday, i spent most of my childhood blackpool, scarborough, and mainly cornwall, so did tje majority of my friends. Going abroad was posh and a treat. Flying was pretty expensive.

I remember the excitement that ketchup/mayo/salad cream came in squeezy plastic bottles rather than glass ones that you had to hit to get the source out. But how much is that comtrubuting ti the plastic crisis.

When did paper straws go out of fashion i remember them loads when i was a kid. But just talkinf to people about mcdonalds introducing them some people were confused how they'd even work. That said we did use trillions of those tiny thin blue ones that came with the school milk (how many of those are floating around our oceans now) but the school milk came in tiny little glass bottles

I'm not trying to preach i'm far far far from perfect. Just its occured to me all these oh we need more liquids in glass bottles i'm really not tuat old and i remember them pretty much all being. The shop local again we were more reliant ob our local shops and less reliant on plastic packaging where/when did it change so much.

I also remember the go green movement of the late 80's i had a big book of being green fir kids or something in 89 ish. It just strikes me that we were actually living what would be considered quite 'eco' these days back in the 80's

My husband brought it home to me when he was explaining to the DC that dustbin men/dustcarts are so names because in days gone by they would only have collected dust.....

Some things are just not worth while these days...

Making your own clothes - patterns, fabrics, trims are all expensive and it's cheaper to buy ready-made

Fixing things - it's often nearly as expensive to buy the parts as to buy a whole new item.

Oh, and re bags in supermarkets, I remember my parents always taking their own bags shopping. Then at some point Asda, i think it was, started banning you from bringing your own bags in (avoiding theft?) You had to leave them at customer service, put all the shopping back in your trolley, take the trolley to customer service, get your bags back and pack them. Sod that, said my mum (only more politely) and instead accepted the free plastic bags and packed at the checkout.

I remember the rag and bone man going down the end of our road ( gosh, I sound old!)

So much fast food now. I still make sandwiches etc or a sale but a lot of the population seem to buy food at lunchtime hence more packaging.

In the 80s there was a better high street and not so much out of town shopping and dm used a basket on wheels rather than the car to the supermarket.

We try to make things last and I replace things when they break rather than changing colour schemes etc.

We have too much stuff now.

You can tell because everything seems to be about "storage" - we didn't need storage beyond a sideboard, a wardrobe, and a food cupboard when I was growing up.

Now we even have storage cupboards for shoes - 2 pairs of shoes - one for school, one for play didn't take up much room...

Yep, we used soap not shower gel and even had a little press that you put all the tiny bits of soap from almost used up bars to make an extra bar. Lobbing bottles into the bottle bank was great stress relief, and newspaper was pressed into logs (another press machine) to burn on the fire. No fast food except fish n chips maybe twice a year. no ready meals except the occasional faggots. Eating in season and growing lots of fruit and veg.
The day to day life now is just so different to when I was growing up and I swear I’m not that old.
I do think that when teenagers bemoan the oldies destroying the environment they don’t realise quite how new most of the single use plastic etc.is.

I remember liquid soap in a pump dispenser being advertised on TV as waste free, the reasoning being that the little bits of soap bars that got too small to handle were waste whereas with liquid soap you got to use it all. No one seemed to consider the plastic that it came in to count as waste. I certainly don't think I did, although I was only a child at the time.

We also had CFCs in aerosols and fridges.

The 80's covered most of my childhood.

You were pretty much considered an environmentalist if you put something in the bin rather than dropping litter! Landfill was the environmentally friendly choice. But there were big campaigns around 'Keep Britain Tidy' and being a 'litterbug' or 'litterlout' was quite despised.

I would have started menstruating in the late 80s. I remember that the instructions on sanitary towels told you to rip it in half lengthways and then flush!

Glass recycling was fairly common. I think that a fairly good proportion of people were willing to do it if they lived near a bottle bank. But they definitely wouldn't go out of their way to do so.

The environmental message was around and I am afraid to say that they were exactly the same messages as today, it is just that it was very niche, perhaps seen as the sign of someone who was slightly eccentric or rather left wing. Anita Roddick took it a bit more mainstream, but her main market seemed to be teenage girls - although they are the forty somethings of today, so she definitely contributed a lot to awareness of the environmental message!

I remember campaigns about:

live animal exports
CFCs in aerosols
whales - the saving of
missiles/US air bases
animal testing
seal culling

The huge, huge change is the availability of single use packaging and take-away food on the high street.

There was nothing, nothing like a café or sandwich shop in either of the places I lived during the 80s. A local sandwich shop opened up in the mid 90s.

But at least we do have doorstep recycling now.

Totally agree. I'm 37. I saw an article the other day about peeled garlic cloves that had been peeled in China then flown to Belgium or somewhere to be packaged in little plastic pots and brought over to be sold in M&S. That is ridiculous. Now we have so much more of a taste for lots of different foods, which is great in many ways, as it just used to be meat and two veg for tea every night but now we expect all good to be available all year round. We don't appreciate some foods are seasonal so they have to be flown in to us from all over the world.

I remember the focus was on binning litter when I was a child and the idea of recycling was just beginning but the focus was on cans and there was so much talk about how aluminium cans could be recycled but steel ones couldn't and there was various initiatives in school and on Blue Peter etc about using a magnet to check if your can was recyclable and sorting them accordingly.

I think possibly people weren't quite so busy back in the 80's. My mum and most of my friends' mums either didn't work or worked part time in a local job, shop or office etc where they could easily pick up groceries from the town on a daily basis or every couple of days so we didn't need fresh food to last long as it would be eaten within a couple of days of purchase. And because they worked locally most families only had one car and the mum usually walked to do the school run and the shopping - I remember those big silver Cross prams with the shopping on the basket underneath. My friends didn't do as many after school clubs etc as my DD and her friend do now so parents had more time and didn't rely so heavily on convenience foods. And they simply weren't as readily available. I am constantly ashamed every week when my shopping arrives how much of it is in plastic packaging, even though I try to make environmental choices where possible, so much of it is packaged in plastic and there is just no other option.

Disposible nappies were only just becoming popular so that was another way that we were eco friendly without realising it.

We certainly didn't have constant drinks in plastic bottles but now they are considered 'safer' so in big events, concerts etc often plastic cups and bottles are the only thing permitted. And everyone is so obsessed with hygiene now that they want everything wrapped up. I saw a thing about hotels who wrap the remote control in plastic once it's been cleaned. How bloody wasteful! And who is to say anyone had actually cleaned it before wrapping it up?!

I know in many ways things are better now, we are beginning to use more renewable energy etc but, in order for any significant changes to be made, I firmly believe the government (whoever it may be) needs to start making tough rules about how things are packaged and transported rather than bowing to consumer pressure. Consumers will have to realise they can't just have everything now. It won't be popular.