Years ago now, volunteering in the school canteen, another mum mocked me for reusing some cling wrap. To me, it seemed perfectly normal not to throw out something useful. To her, it was ridiculous. And worse, dirty.
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This is not to say I'm some brilliant environment housekeeping warrior. I suck. I spend way too much time looking at the bottom of plastic containers to see if I can decipher whether they are actually recyclable. I forget to take bags to the shops so fill my pockets with stuff and carry the rest in an unsteady bundle in my arms. I drive a car, I buy stuff in packaging; I buy so much yoghurt. I use heaters when I should be putting on more jumpers.
But I can't say I am in a hopeless panic about the restriction on single-use plastic bags by the major supermarkets – and how (slightly) reassuring it is to see those supermarkets working for the public good (instead of ripping off farmers or ripping off their employees).
Our local supermarket decided to bite the bullet a few weeks ahead of the big chains so I decided to stand outside the checkouts and observe what I predicted to be utter utter chaos.
Nothing.
A few people grumbling. A few people resorting to buying bags (some of those bags are just 15c) and the vast majority of people going about their business, with bags they brought from home, boxes they've picked up, granny trolleys (don't knock them until you've tried them, thanks very much) and the occasional use of child labour, where every child carries a few things home.
No, in our house, the question was how we would dispose of rubbish.
Since our last kids left home, what we put out for rubbish collection has declined dramatically – fewer people, less waste. But it also concentrated our minds on how to reduce it even further. We compost everything. When I say we, I mean he composts everything, I merely admire the glorious garden with productive citrus trees. We rinse, we recycle, we reuse.
But it's that range of stuff which is soggy, mushy, unrecyclable or compostable that seemed to me to be the wicked problem of ordinary household refuse. Lining my kitchen bin with newspaper didn't work.
It felt like this was all going to add to housework hours, more fussing with stuff I didn't want to deal with. But Ruth Schwartz Cowan, a historian of science, technology and medicine, puts me in my place. She is the author of the 1983 classic More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave – which comes to the conclusion that when it comes to the amount of time we spend on housework, we haven't really benefited from new technologies. Instead, the work we do is less effort but we still take the same amount of time doing it. She discards my idea that disposing of garbage in a sustainable way will take ever more of my precious time. First of all, disposal never accounted for much in the way of housework time use and second, once you organise yourself, it doesn't take any longer.
I tell her about the backlash against the banning of single-use plastics and she says conservatives hate regulation of any kind.
"They are the same people who didn't want to buckle seat belts," she says from her home in New York, where the battle to ban single-use plastics continues.
So, I am on the hunt for a replacement. The closest thing I've found is a something made from corn, compostable and Australian (if you search those terms, you'll find the product) and I rang the only environmental professor I actually know to ask her what she thought. She gave it the thumbs up so I plan to give them a go.
But senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney Jenni Downes, says the whole recycling thing is so complex, it is no wonder our brains burst.
"Plastic bags are one of the worst forms of single-use plastics because the only way they can be recycled is to turn them into products like street furniture – and there's only so much street furniture we can use," she says.
Downes also explains some bags which claim to be compostable aren't really –they end up in landfill (instead of being composted) where there is no available oxygen to break them down. Bags that claim to be biodegradable are the devil's work – they have chemicals which cause them to break down into microplastics and they don't actually go away.
She is pleased that this week the senate inquiry into the waste and recycling industry in Australia recommended a phase out of petroleum-based single-use plastics by 2023 - such a move would require careful definition and implementation, says Downes. Plus a solution to the dog poo problem.
In the meantime, I recommend the granny trolley. Smart, sustainable and no composting required.
Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.
