So many memories live in a very small old house on the East Coast of Tasmania; people, events, things.  Time and time, by the hour, by the minute some days, they wash back at me.  None more so strongly than this month.  In a fit of eco-sustainability-resilience, I bought some garbage bags touted as being non-plastic and completely biodegradable – you can put them in the compost, the website spruiked…  I was suspicious and did some research and concluded they may actually be biodegradable, as opposed to breaking down into endlessly smaller pieces of non-biodegradable plastic.  But after a week or two of using these, I realised the major content of my biodegradable bag was traditional plastic.  So this all seemed a bit of an oxymoron; wrapping the undegradable in the degradable.

So this initiated an audit of the plastics used in the house.  We’ve started using a cake of soap instead of bottled body wash.  Why did we ever stop?  I’m poised to start taking containers to a co-op to buy flour, pasta and pulsars.  I save and re-use the small plastic bags at the Fruit and Veg market.

But one evening when I was cleaning up the kitchen, my wrists submerged in hot soapy water, a memory from the old house on the East Coast of Tasmania washed over me – a device, a small wire cage on a handle in which a cake of soap was held.  To wash up the dishes, one simply held the device under the running tap and then swished it with gay abandon to create lovely, hot, bubbly water.  Where and why this thought had been held in my head for fifty years, I have no idea.  Maybe this was a false memory but as everyone who was there is now dead, I have no manner of verification.  But if we had such a device now, that would be at least a dozen less plastic bottles a year I would throw in the recycling.  But it’s recycling, I hear you say.  Yes – but recycling takes HUGE amounts of energy.  It’s better just not to consume.

I hit the internet and found photos of such devices.  And with a bit more detective clicking, I found a company who makes them.  So I ordered one and to my delight, it works.  And I’d wager with the novelty of such a device, you may even be able to con a teenager into its use, occasionally.

Where the original device went I don’t know, no doubt pitched in one of my mother’s drives.  But answers are in the past.  I don’t buy the idea that everything new is convenient.  Humanity has always sculpted convenience from what was available.  It’s just that prior to the bloom of non-rotting plastic, there were other just as convenient methods for doing some things.

And this is soft on the environment while you do the dishes.  Dig back into your memories to sculpt the future.