I'm an obsessional recycler. Not just the normal recycling that I do each week but I am constantly thinking how I can reuse old items instead of buying new. A friend of mine, who knows I am very interested in these sort of things, added me to a Green Facebook group about recycling. I started out full of enthusiasm in the group but lost steam after a while. The trouble is even though it is wonderful to see all these recyclers, some of them, in my view, miss the point a bit. Plastic has become such a big demon that everyone in the group had become single minded in banning it from their house. They have long discussions on replacing their plastic pegs with new wooden ones, usually expensively made from an online eco company, There seems to me what ever you want, there is an expensive eco friendly product being made out there somewhere. Surely the best answer is to hang on to your plastic pegs, keep them out of landfill for as long as you can then when they are literally unusable replace them with some second hand pegs, wooden or otherwise, that would have gone to landfill, probably discarded by someone who has bought an expensive eco friendly option.
Years ago when video cassettes fell out of favour I tried to find a place to dispose of them. With four children we had so many. Often given as presents and then bought at car boot sales they got so much pleasure from them but along came DVDs then streaming and video cassettes are a thing of the past. Nobody wanted them, not charity shops, not recycling centres. How many millions of these have gone to landfill. I packed them all up and put them in the loft even though Tom thought I was mad. One day they will work out how to recycle this plastic I thought, then I will get rid of them.
In the last year with Scarlett spending so much time at our house I have started wondering if she too could get pleasure from all these old films. My Dad gave me his old video player, ours went to landfill years ago, before my aim was to keep everything away from it. I have spent days researching on YouTube how to connect one to a modern HD widescreen television and yesterday while Scarlett was with us the wire arrived. She was so excited I'd found some Fireman Sam videos for her to watch. Old ones that youngest son used to watch 25 years ago, not the new remakes. (Have you seen the new Fireman Sam, good grief!) The quality isn't the best but Scarlett didn't seem to care she loved it. At the end of the day she and youngest son were having a long conversation about Thomas the Tank Engine. He has persuaded her these old videos are the things to watch next week. He's going to sort out all his old Thomas The Tank Engine trains for her and already she knows all the trains names and numbers. She's so excited about it but I can't help but wonder who is really getting the most pleasure from it! Here is the simple £3.50 wire that has given her (and youngest son) so much pleasure, If you have old video cassettes, or even old family camcorder recordings, this is all you need to bring them back to life. At least now the videos can be used for a few more years and by then some clever person will have found a way to recycle the plastic.
