Plastic-free memories

DURING my childhood days, we didn’t know we were being environment-friendly. We were just being normal. Take cold drinks, for instance. There was no such thing as “grab and go.” What we had was a glorious crate of glass bottles. Stacked neatly at the back of the shop, usually behind the counter or under the old ceiling fan, the crate had an irresistible charm.

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As kids, we’d carry the empty bottles from home — rattling and clinking all the way — because only after returning them would we get a full, chilled one in return. You drank it there or took it home, but either way, the bottle went back to the crate. No single-use nonsense. Just a satisfyingly circular system that worked.

Milk followed the same philosophy. You would take from home thick glass bottles to the milk booth, which would often have a queue and a lot of chatter. The booth operator would replace your empty bottles with filled ones. No pouches. No plastic. No tetra packs. Somehow, the milk tasted fresher than it does today. Maybe it was the absence of packaging guilt!

Our shopping trips were a ritual in themselves. No one left the house without a cloth bag. Usually a bit faded, sometimes stitched from old bedcovers, and always reliable. It lived tucked behind the kitchen door, and you didn’t dare forget it. Because shopkeepers rarely had bags. And if they did, they were flimsy paper ones made from yesterday’s newspaper — complete with crossword clues and the odd face of a politician smiling awkwardly under your onions.

We reused everything. Old Horlicks jars were reincarnated as containers for lentils. Newspapers became book covers, makeshift mats or window cleaners. Old clothes were turned into mops or stitched into colourful quilts. Even plastic bags, when they started creeping into our lives, were never thrown away. They were washed, folded and stored in a bigger plastic bag.

Then somewhere along the way, convenience became king.

Plastic bags started appearing — sleek, strong and suspiciously indestructible. Cloth bags began disappearing. Milk came in plastic pouches. Cold drinks shifted to PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles that you tossed away without a second thought. Everything became easier — and also, somehow, a little lonelier. Our connection with things dimmed.

Today, on World Environment Day, we are all being gently (and sometimes not so gently) nudged to live more sustainably. But I can’t help thinking — we already knew how to do that. Long before hashtags and climate pledges, we lived low-waste lives out of habit, not obligation.

The world has moved on. But maybe it’s time to circle back — to some of the gentler, wiser ways of our past. Like glass bottles and cloth bags. Like reusing things until they earned retirement. Like knowing that the earth doesn’t owe us convenience — it only lends us space.