The Environment and Recycling

Story · all 20 words

My Daughter Reorganised the Kitchen

My daughter came home from school in April with a project about the environment and, within a fortnight, had completely reorganised the way this family lives. She was eleven.

She began by counting. For one week she wrote down every single thing we decided to throw away. At the end of it she presented her findings to us at the table like somebody delivering bad news to a company: four bin bags for three people, of which she calculated slightly more than half could have been avoided.

The biggest single thing was packaging. Vegetables in plastic trays wrapped in more plastic. A box containing a smaller box containing four biscuits. She held up a container that had held two hundred grams of tomatoes and weighed almost as much as the tomatoes had.

So we changed things, and I want to be honest about which changes lasted. We now recycle properly rather than optimistically, which mostly meant learning what our council actually takes. We stopped buying single-use water bottles and bought four metal ones, and we reuse jars for everything, so that our cupboard now looks like a small museum.

The things that did not last were the difficult ones. We tried taking our own containers to the market, and did it twice. My wife still drives to work because the bus takes ninety minutes and she does not have ninety minutes.

My daughter was not impressed by any of this. She had learned at school that individual behaviour is a small part of the problem, and she told me so, in the tone of somebody who has recently discovered that adults are not in charge of anything. She is right, of course, and I still think the metal bottles matter.

What she really changed was how we talk. Climate change was not a subject in this house before that April. Now my father argues about renewable energy at dinner, my brother has strong opinions about whether an electric car is really better, and my mother – who has never thrown a piece of litter in her life and who reuses everything out of habit rather than principle – has been quietly doing all of this since 1974 and is enjoying being right.

Our neighbour put solar panels on his roof in June and has told every single person on the street exactly how much they save.

The part that stayed with me was a page in her project about a species of bird that used to nest along our river and is now endangered. She had drawn it herself. She wrote that pollution in the water had damaged the insects it eats, and that a group in the next town is trying to protect what is left.

She is thirteen now and she volunteers there on Saturday mornings. My carbon footprint is smaller than it was, my kitchen is full of jars, and none of that is the point. The point is that somebody in this family decided that global warming was a thing you could do something about rather than a thing you watched on television, and it turned out to be catching.

A sustainable habit, she told me last week, is one you can still be doing in ten years. She read that somewhere. I have not stopped thinking about it.