One Man's Trash

The first time I saw an advertisement for a car boot sale, I confess that I was mystified. Common sense told me that it could not be a sale of car boots, but otherwise I was perplexed. Today there can be few people who do not know what one is and there are literally hundreds of such sales up and down the country - there are over seventy regular car boot sales in Essex alone.

The car boot sale apparently originated in Canada - where, unsurprisingly, it was known as a trunk fair - and the idea was introduced into the UK by a Catholic priest from Stockport, as a charity fundraiser in the early 1970's. Val and I have done a few boot sales to sell off household items that have been surplus to requirements - most recently, we did one last weekend - and we are always amazed by the amount, and type, of things that people will buy. We have sold books, CDs, toys, clothes, furniture, jewellery, perfumes, shoes - you name it, it seems folks will buy it. Arriving at the boot sale and setting up, it was amazing how many other sellers (they must be sellers, as the sale wasn't open to buyers for another hour) descended upon us asking if we had particular items - watches and perfume were especially popular, not that we had any of either. These hardened sellers obviously know what things sell best.

The good old British car boot sale.

Five or six hours later we had made a few quid - not as much as the last time we did a boot sale, but an amount not to be sniffed at - and we packed up the remaining items and took them home, either to take to an unsuspecting charity shop, or to throw away. One reason for going to a boot sale last weekend was to coincide with our having hired a skip so that we could clear out our shed and garage, the latter being used for storing everything except a car. There are two reasons why our car doesn't go in the garage; firstly, even if I could get the car in it, the garage is barely wide enough to open a car door and get out, and secondly, the garage is full of the flotsam and jetsam we accrue and then dispose of on a regular basis. Annually it seems we accumulate piles of detritus; cardboard boxes and other wrappings from domestic purchases that we keep on the offchance that either we have to return said purchase or in case the box comes in handy, which it rarely does. After spending a few days last year trolling back and forth to the local tip, we decided to hire a skip this year, to save time, if not money,  and like the car boot locusts who descend the moment you arrive at a Sunday morning sale, our skip has attracted a few passing totters who have relieved us of sundry items like chairs, an old lawn mower, scooter and ironing board.

What really is remarkable is the amount of stuff we manage to amass these days and how much of it is rubbish. Outside our back door we have four wheelie bins; one for normal waste, one for recycling and two for garden waste (we have a large garden and the first lawn cut of spring will easily fill both bins) and they are always full come collection day. Contrast this to fifty years ago when I was a nipper and my parents had one bin, small in comparison to any of my wheelie bins, which was for all of their refuse and which was emptied each week.

Today, a row of wheelie bins has replaced the single bin and the old fashioned dustman:

These days we, and I'm sure many of you, have more rubbish than we can cope with. There are innumerable reasons for this. Firstly there is packaging. Everything that my parents bought loose now comes in layers of packaging. My Mother would go to the greengrocers and have pounds of potatoes, onions, carrots and whatever, weighed loose by the shopkeeper and tipped directly into her shopping bag. Nowadays supermarkets insist on selling everything in plastic, with some fruit or veg sitting on polystyrene trays in the bags, and while I try and buy as much loose as possible, with some things there is no choice. Convenience foods when I was young were tinned, by and large. Ravioli and rice pudding out of a can were the nearest thing to ready meals that my Mother ever cooked (or should that be heated?), whereas nowadays you can see shoppers' trolleys piled high with microwave lasagne or paella all of which generate obscene amounts of waste card and foil containers. My parents' generation cooked more food from scratch, meaning that the waste they generated was more likely to be potato peelings and the leaves from a cauliflower (both of which were of course compostable).

Secondly there is the conspicuous consumption that many people indulge in and from which few are immune. Despite the undoubted hardships that many people have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of economic downturn and austerity measures, a good many things are cheaper, both relatively and actually, than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Look at video recorders, which I wrote about recently. The first one I bought, in 1989, cost £350; fast forward (pun intended) to the days when the last ones were on sale in the High Street and they were going for under fifty quid. And clothes: thanks to shops like Primark, the price of polo shirts, shorts, lightweight jackets, even winter coats, are lower than they were in the days when I had a full head of hair (about 1985).

We live in an increasingly throw-away society, even though that term is hardly new, having been first coined in 1955 in Life magazine. Few people 'make do and mend' like our forebears, we dispose of things because they bore us rather than because they are worn out. Manufacturers of consumer items like mobile phones, televisions games consoles, all forms of computers and tablets - most electronic devices really - constantly bring out new versions of their products, encouraging us to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.

The amount we throw away is astonishing. This graphic shows the domestic waste from each home in the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham.

At one time many people would fight shy of buying used goods - there was a certain stigma about doing so. Today, with the proliferation of boot sales, the rise of the charity shop and the stores selling pre-owned or vintage, cherished items, and the incredible popularity of websites like Gumtree and eBay, buying second-hand is to some extent fashionable - and cheaper. We all generate more rubbish and things we simply tire of or outgrow than any previous generation, which means  that anything we can do to reuse or recycle more and more must be a good thing. Today more than ever, one man's trash is another man's treasure.