In the ‘dark old days’, if you wanted some butter, you took your glass, or pottery or earthenware dish to the shop or the dairy and they stuck half-a-pound of their finest in it and you went home. That wasn’t called ‘recycling’ back then, it was just called ‘shopping’. Similarly you either took your jug to be filled with milk or they brought it to you in glass bottles. Which you returned empty and they sterilised and used again. But the world was in a rush, became busier and much more affluent once everyone had stopped attacking each other for years on end with heavy artillery and bombs dropped from planes. So they invented ‘convenience’. Which was a combined euphemism for ‘disposable’ and ‘plastic’. Consumers demanded things easy to buy, relatively clean and the manufacturers decided that sterile plastics were so cheap and easy to make that after 1973 the entire contents of the entire planet would be entirely contained, covered, delivered and stored, entirely in plastics. What could possibly go wrong?

In fact it all worked swimmingly. Until water was invented in 1989 by Evian. Previously you just drank water out of cups at the kitchen sink. But then someone decided that water was not just for mealtimes, not even for merely quenching thirst. No. It was something that had to be consumed, or seen to be consumed, at all times. If you weren’t carrying your little bottle of water along the streets you were either a sad fat bastard or a tramp. Who carried cider. In tin cans. Water consumption increased from 1.2 litres per person per day, in 1971 to 15.9 gallons in 2007. They had to build more toilets to meet the increasing, obsessive demands of a world telling us to ‘drink, drink, drink!!!’

And it all came in little plastic bottles. Unrecyclable and toxic. Which has now reached the point that every hamburger, every fish finger, every frikkin mushroom will soon have to include ‘PET’ in its list of constituent ingredients. Because PolyEthylene Terephthalate is in absolutely fucking everything ‘organic’. The stuff of our beloved water bottles is clogging up the oceans, ruining the countryside, filling every little space. Where it breaks down into micro-bits and enters the food chain. Nice. You want full milk? Semi-skimmed? Or double plastic?? It is everywhere. Which is why I have never bought a bottle of water. For myself. Ok, for my family I’ve bought 956 tons of the stuff over the years. And I regret every one.

Everything is now plastic. Look at Lila’s world.

But we’re saved. Because they’ve found an enzyme which actually breaks down PET, that most evil and ruinous substance. It ‘eats’ it. And in doing so it breaks it down into its original constituent parts which are totally reusable. But what if it gets fed up with eating plastic and morphs into a new enzyme that eats people!?!?!? I’m just sayin’.

This enzyme just evolved, in a plastics plant in Japan. Now they’re working on it to make it a bit faster, a bit more potent. But just shows. Evolution is much cleverer than people. Particularly those people who toss used water bottles out of car windows, onto beaches, in rivers. You know who you are.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx