I still haven’t got around to cleaning up this pig sty I call my flat. Well it’s not mine but it is where I live and it is a mess. It seems I get distracted easily and when it comes to cleaning, it is all too easy to become “interested” in something all together different from the task at hand. I’ve made small in roads but I’ve been telling myself that I really need to clean this mess up, pretty much every week this year and it never seems to get done. Ah well, I did organise a Council clean up this week and I managed to demolish the old wardrobe I had; ready to be placed out on the street. I feel guilty by this so called waste that really could have  been re-used, but recycling isn’t as easy as one would imagine it to be. The wardrobe might have looked okay with a new paint job after a few patch jobs with some putty. If I had a house with a garage I could of used it as a storage cabinet but whilst renting, it looked pretty mangy sitting in the spare room. Although now I’ve uncovered the mangy leak or concrete cancer that is seeping through from the bathroom. Can’t win!

It disturbs me of how wasteful I am. In an age of climatic catastrophe and our landscape being inundated with waste dumped into landfill, I am painfully aware of my part in the downfall of this planet. I’m going to contribute a quantity this week to the local tip and it just seems wrong that throwing shit out is so much more easier than trying to have stuff re-used or recycled. I have too much shit that is easy to accumulate without so much as a passing thought on the consequences my whim has on the environment. I have this CRT monitor that I picked up second hand as a project I had at the time and now I have no use for it and I can’t give it away, although I have a option of getting Dell to pick it as their recycling service for their branded components but I have to go through hoops to get rid of it when I could just throw it out with  rest of the shit I put out on Wednesday night. It’s just wrong!

I have so much shit that although fun at the time, now just sits on a shelf collecting dust and being the lazy sod that I am I haven’t got around of selling or giving away. Too much stuff that eventually, more than likely will just be poured into landfill. I really need to curb this desire to consume without conscience. With flat packed rubbish furniture, cheap and easy to purchase goods there is little thought about where it all goes once the novelty is worn or a new whim supersedes the last. We are seemingly programmed to have no conscience when consuming and feeding the coffers of retail chains with cash and certainly there isn’t anything in the fine print that calls for some organised waste management from such chains, nor do they reinforce a green ideology when resources are cheaper to manufacture than dispose of.

Surely because items are designed with built in obsolescence then a portion of the ticket price ought to be laid aside for recycling by the manufacturer. In a perfect world I could buy something on a whim and then return it for recycling once the novelty and usefulness has expired. It’s pretty tragic when not even charitable organisations will accept certain items. A friend recently tried to off load a working and good quality washing machine to the Salvos but it was rejected because of some superficial rust on the outside. If they didn’t accept a high ticket priced washer then I have no hope of them collecting the mangy stuff I have. So off to the tip it goes. For wastefulness I am guilty. Of the system that supports wastefulness, I’m guilty. It will be interesting to see if  iGen will change behaviour from the extravagant wastage of GenX.