Once upon a time, when we didn’t want something anymore, we just threw it away. But ‘away’ has gone away—the things we throw away end up somewhere. The rubbish that we don’t want in our back garden will have to go somewhere else: into somebody else’s back garden, or next to somebody’s bit of land. So, by keeping our own personal space clean, tidy, and free from pollutants, we are selfishly passing the problem onto someone else. You might think you have every right to do so because you pay your taxes, and these include rubbish disposal. But that doesn’t make the landfill site any better looking, it doesn’t save the local living creatures from suffering the poisons the landfill site has leached into the surrounding earth, or from the fumes belched out by the vehicles used to transport that rubbish around the world. Nor does it help the desecration caused to the earth by the mining required to build those vehicles and waste handling plants, or to provide them with fuel and electricity.

I have recently become more and more aware of the amount of rubbish I bring home with me every time I go to the supermarket—rubbish called packaging. When I get home, I can fill a bin bag with stuff I have just bought that I didn’t need; stuff that was there solely to assist in the sale of what it contained. The cardboard box around my tube of toothpaste, for example, or the cardboard box used to make my round pot of hummus square so it will stack easier, when the round pot was all that was really needed. The list goes on and on.

Supermarkets are becoming one of the dominant forces in the world. They could be considered to have more power than our governments in their ability to dictate prices and control farming issues. If supermarkets wanted less packaging, then manufacturers would produce less packaging. If supermarkets had to dispose of the packaging themselves, then they would want less packaging. If you were to take any unnecessary packaging off your shopping items as you put them into your bags at the checkout and leave it there, then the supermarket would have to deal with it. They would have to place it in their bins and pay for its disposal. If everyone did this, pretty soon supermarkets would be racking up huge disposal bills, and they would have their manufacturers provide stock with as little packaging as possible. If this happened, we would all have a bit less to throw away, and the world would be a little bit nicer because of it.

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“Away has gone away” is a quote from Michael Braungart in the book Cradle to Cradle.