No imagination is needed to think about a world without plastic

If you were to invent a straw made out of plastic, it might work better. It might not collapse in on itself halfway through the drink.

And that, I decide, is how the first plastic straw came into being.

But here we are all this time later, giving up on the plastic straw and going back to the straws that I used to dunk in milkshakes at primary school.

In those days, we were used to the perils of the paper straw, just as we were used to peeling our wax proof paper off our soggy sandwiches and saving our paper bags that contained our lunch, so they could last for at least a week.

When they were done (ie gone the same way as the paper straw), they were put in the incinerator where our school paper rubbish was burnt. The rest of the scraps went to the pig farmer who came every day, carting our metal rubbish bins on his back. He could do this because we didn't have a whole lot of rubbish. There were no plastic bottles (we used our hands under the bubblers, or just went thirsty). There were not even any plastic lunch boxes. And the wonder of cling wrap hadn't been thought of.

The bread was delivered, directly into the bread bin with no wrapping in sight. Empty milk bottles were replaced with full ones and we even left the money on the front step, safe in the knowledge it would be there in the morning for the milk man to collect.

The fish van came on Fridays. The groceries came in brown paper bags and fruit and vegetables were put straight in the box. Mum wrapped her rubbish in the pages of Courier Mail.

The single use bag was the string bag that Mum took shopping every where she went. Nappies were toweling squares that got washed.

We didn't call it recycling, but we used everything until it had no further use. Ours was the time when Dad's underpants made excellent rags for cleaning the car. We didn't buy cleaning cloths on a roll.

We fixed things back then. When we bought something we bought it to last. And if we needed a spare part, we weren't above a forage at the dump to find it.

And now things have gone full cycle. It's not hard to imagine a world without waste, when my world was once exactly that.