The inconvenient “good old” days contained some very “good old” ecological ways.
I grew up seventy-two years ago in a small seaside town in England. To anyone under thirty-five, seventy-two is ancient; the rest of us marvel at how fast time passes. With no refrigeration, you shopped once a week or you ate something out of a can for dinner.
Before plastic, people all over the world used some sort of cloth shopping bag. It might be a fancy store-bought item or something simple, sewn from a piece of left over cotton. The burlap that potatoes used to come in made useful shopping bags.
Thankfully the cloth bag has re-appeared, but the supermarkets still have thick rolls of smaller plastic bags for vegetables and bulk items and the ‘I will not disintegrate for about twenty thousand years’ plastic bags are still very much in place.
