A Reminder of How Wasteful Our Generation Was!

Geezerette, I know so at least in our town. If you get your garbage picked up in the county. You pay a boatload. And if you don't your not allowed to burn it. If you take your recycles to the town's recycling center they must be sorted and cleaned. And then they take them to where they pay for them. We do have scrappers who ride the roads in a pickup and take any metal items you have and sell them for money. At least they are ambitious enough to work for it. And they ask first!
 

My mother used to keep the ashes from her fire to put on the garden...and if the bin was too full..she would set fire to it..funniest thing ever was if you didn't give the bin men a ''Christmas box'' they would drop or throw the contents of your bin all over your path..
 
Monday was always washday for my mother. I never knew why -- it just was. And Tuesday was ironing day. Wednesday was shopping day because the grocery store gave double green stamps on Wednesday. And we saved the brown paper bags for book covers, trash, etc.

Because my parents lived through the Depression, they were very careful to "re-use and re-cycle" -- they just didn't call it that. We had a lot of jelly jar drinking glasses. They also didn't just throw things away the second they didn't work quite right (my dad fixed a lot of stuff), and they didn't get a new whatever just because there was a fancier one out there. They kept an older washing machine, for example, until it was finally really, really, really dead.
 

Hagrid, we had a little mesh box with a handle that would hold a cake of Sunlight soap. After boiling the jug for the washing up - no hot water service back then, we would swish the cake of soap around in the sink to make sufficient suds for the washing up.

What gets me now is that we buy fridges, TV's, computers and just about everything else "electronic" and they seem to have built in obsolescence. They cost almost the same price to repair as they do to replace, so we throw them out and buy a new one instead. Surely that is extremely wasteful.
 
Mom saved "tin foil" pieces that had not been smeared by anything to re-use later. We didn't sit in a drive-through fast food line w/ motors running and I still don't. While we probably didn't crush dead vehicles to save space, we didn't have as many! No styrofoam cups, we used paper Dixie cups. Detergent was mostly powdered in paper boxes that degraded, not in large plastic containers filling up the landfills.
 
Just love this picture of wash day in New York, SeaBreeze. Where ever did you find it?
Monday was also Gran's wash day: First water was hauled to the boiler, the fire was lit, then the white goods nearly boiled half to death,then rinsed, put thru the ancient ringer (wish I had a picture of it!).
Meanwhile the clothes lines were strung between house and wash house, coal and wood shed, grandfather's storage section for electrical goods, outdoor WC.
It could take days for the washing to dry.
But the agony did not end here-all white goods had to be wound thru the "Mangel" (rolling press), which for some unknown reason was located in the cellar, access only by trapdoor in the pantry.
So grateful now for "automatic washing machines", would hate to return to the "good ole days"! :gettowork:
 
Susie said:
Just love this picture of wash day in New York, SeaBreeze. Where ever did you find it?
Monday was also Gran's wash day: First water was hauled to the boiler, the fire was lit, then the white goods nearly boiled half to death,then rinsed, put thru the ancient ringer (wish I had a picture of it!).
Meanwhile the clothes lines were strung between house and wash house, coal and wood shed, grandfather's storage section for electrical goods, outdoor WC.
It could take days for the washing to dry.
But the agony did not end here-all white goods had to be wound thru the "Mangel" (rolling press), which for some unknown reason was located in the cellar, access only by trapdoor in the pantry.
So grateful now for "automatic washing machines", would hate to return to the "good ole days"! :gettowork:
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I dimly remember my mother had a mangle. We weren't allowed anywhere near it, but it flattened the sheets and stuff like that? Some kind of ironing device? I have a very dim memory of it being a big contraption (but then I was very little) and had a top part that came down on the bottom part, or something like that and it got hot. Is that what you are talking about? Or is my memory way off?
 
My mother also had a wringer washer and we were repeatedly warned to keep away and NOT to put our fingers or hands anywhere near it when she was using it. Washday was a very big deal and a lot of work. Thank heavens nowdays it is so much easier, though I do still hang some things on the line because I don't like the way they draw up in the dryer. And line dried sheets on a nice sunny day do smell so delightful, and for some reason I like the sound of them snapping in the wind. Brings me back to my childhood.
 
Remember canning and picking blackberries in the summer. My job was to wash the spider web filled jars. Because I had the only hands that would slide completly in the jars! Dressed from head to toe for blackberry picking. Went around 5AM and stayed till noon. When my kids were little, we still picked wild blackberries and put up 54 quarts a year. Can't hardly find enough wild blackberries now for a cobbler.
 
I don't think it was our fault that the earth got trashed. Certain things simply became unavailable. If you live in an apartment it's hard to hang your clothes out to dry. I still save aluminum foil, still re-use glass jars, make my own laundry soap and will not use that expensive wasteful commercial stuff, I cut up old clothes to use as rags or to make ties for the tomato plants. One thing I should do is to use some old towels and make good potholders. Good cotton potholders, not the made in China cheap ones. Shouldn't be too hard to do--I wonder what to use for stuffing inside though--something that doesn't conduct heat, lol. We could still do things the old way and maybe teach the younger generation not to be so wasteful of resources.
 
Just plain me said:
Remember canning and picking blackberries in the summer. My job was to wash the spider web filled jars. Because I had the only hands that would slide completly in the jars! Dressed from head to toe for blackberry picking. Went around 5AM and stayed till noon. When my kids were little, we still picked wild blackberries and put up 54 quarts a year. Can't hardly find enough wild blackberries now for a cobbler.
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I picked 5 gallons of blackberrys last summer. We froze some but canned most. Blackberrys are plentiful around here.
 
My grandparents had a coal stove in the dining room (shot-gun house - kitchen, then dining room, then living room with two bedrooms and a bath upstairs). As Pappy said, the dining room would be sweltering. There was a vent in the ceiling that let hot air rise into the upstairs....it was always pretty cold up there. Then they put in a coal furnace in the basement, but as the house was on a hill, the coal truck couldn't dispense it directly into the basement. They'd dump it on the sidewalk and grandpa had to carry it up the steps and dump in through a basement window. What a lot of work!
 
Just plain me said:
www.butterbin.com

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days." The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."
She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks.

This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling's. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was
right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the
green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that
operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of
buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a
computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.
But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person.:sentimental:
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I remember it all!

I remember the heavy brown paper grocery bags. Paper (back in the day) I think was better, but considering the world population was at 3 billion, paper was sustainable. Nowadays, trees and entire forests are being mowed-down to produce paper products.

No Pampers diapers in our house. I was a fulltime stay-at-home mom, and living up to the frugal and stay-at-home mom that I was, I used cloth diapers and rubber pants on all the little bum-bums in our home (no Pampers), laundered in my washing machine and hung to dry on the clothesline, and when my kids reached the age and stage of toilet training, I used 100% cotton training pants, not disposable pull-ups, and that was in the 80's and 90's, not the 1960's.

For years we cut our lawn using an electric lawnmower... same for our trimmer, electric, too, and we remained a single vehicle family until the early 90's.

I canned, cooked, and baked from scratch (still do), and to this day whatever I can reuse, recycle, or repurpose, I do.
 
SeaBreeze said:
I remember returning those glass bottles for deposit, and worked in a bottling plant where they were all washed, sanitized and re-used. Long before the plastic bags, we also used the paper bags for trash, and book covers.

I grew up in a third floor apartment, which had no elevator...used the stairs every day. I baby-sat my two nephews way back then, and yes, we did use cloth diapers and didn't have the waste and pollution of the disposables used today.

My mother didn't have a dryer for the clothes, but hung them out on the wash line. In winter, we'd joke because they were stiff like there were people still inside the clothes. Those clothes lines also doubled as jump ropes for us kids to play with.

We had one small TV, and used handkerchiefs , before tissues became popular. Still use wadded up newspaper to send a package in the mail. And used newspaper to dry windows, washed with water and white vinegar.

Remember the fountain pen well, before the disposable Bic pens. Still replace the razors in our double or single edge razor blades. I walked to school everyday, and never saw a power strip as a kid. In fact, I remember seeing the first Styrofoam cup as a child, used to just see the paper cups used.

Us old folks, we're responsible for the big plastic garbage dump in the oceans, and all the other ills of the modern day world. We were such a selfish and spoiled lot, weren't we? :p Good post Just plain me...the real deal! đź‘Ť
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Yep, me, too, SeaBreeze... when family needed a babysitter, Aunt Marg was it, and nieces and nephews all wore cloth diapers and rubber pants.

Same for when I babysat for mothers in and around the neighbourhood... everyone used cloth diapers, pins, and rubber pants (1970's).
 
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Butterfly said:
My mother also had a wringer washer and we were repeatedly warned to keep away and NOT to put our fingers or hands anywhere near it when she was using it. Washday was a very big deal and a lot of work. Thank heavens nowdays it is so much easier, though I do still hang some things on the line because I don't like the way they draw up in the dryer. And line dried sheets on a nice sunny day do smell so delightful, and for some reason I like the sound of them snapping in the wind. Brings me back to my childhood.
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Grandmother's old wringer finally went kaput and so she broke down and bought .... you got it, another wringer!!!!! The year was 1957 and automatics were well-established. o_O

That's OK she also kept a coal burning stove maintained, fed, and banked at night.

Hmmm, guess her hard-working ways didn't kill her though; lived until 95, longer than any other family member.
 
Damaged Goods said:
Grandmother's old wringer finally went kaput and so she broke down and bought .... you got it, another wringer!!!!! The year was 1957 and automatics were well-established. o_O

That's OK she also kept a coal burning stove maintained, fed, and banked at night.

Hmmm, guess her hard-working ways didn't kill her though; lived until 95, longer than any other family member.
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My grandmother can go one better than that even...she never had a washig machine all her life..she washed everything by hand on a washboard and a bar of soap... didn't even have a wringer.. and she died in the 80's

She also had a coal fire... and she lived in an aprtment oup on the 2nd floor.. and the colam delivered to the coal bunnnker in the communal backyard, so she had to carry her coal up to keep in the skuttle for a day or 2's use .. all by herself..
 
Damaged Goods said:
Grandmother's old wringer finally went kaput and so she broke down and bought .... you got it, another wringer!!!!! The year was 1957 and automatics were well-established. o_O

That's OK she also kept a coal burning stove maintained, fed, and banked at night.

Hmmm, guess her hard-working ways didn't kill her though; lived until 95, longer than any other family member.
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My mom, right to the bitter-end, swore by wringer washing machines. She truly loved hers.

She loathed the process of rolling the washing machine (stored at the back of our house) into the kitchen on laundry day, then going through the rigor-Moro of filling, draining, etc, etc, but the process itself of running things through the rollers, she loved, and I have to admit, I loved it, too.

I was young when I started helping her with washing... my job was to catch all that exited the rollers, deposit it into the waiting laundry basket, then mom and I would go out back and she'd hang all on the line.

I still remember the sights and sounds associated with doing laundry in moms old-fashioned wringer washing machine, and my mom was adamant that nothing got babies diapers cleaner than an old-fashioned wringer washing machine.
 
Aunt Marg said:
My mom, right to the bitter-end, swore by wringer washing machines. She truly loved hers.

She loathed the process of rolling the washing machine (stored at the back of our house) into the kitchen on laundry day, then going through the rigor-Moro of filling, draining, etc, etc, but the process itself of running things through the rollers, she loved, and I have to admit, I loved it, too.

I was young when I started helping her with washing... my job was to catch all that exited the rollers, deposit it into the waiting laundry basket, then mom and I would go out back and she'd hang all on the line.

I still remember the sights and sounds associated with doing laundry in moms old-fashioned wringer washing machine, and my mom was adamant that nothing got babies diapers cleaner than an old-fashioned wringer washing machine.
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That's surprising because I'm sure your mom was far younger than Nana (b.1892) and thus more attuned to modern things. My mom (b. 1921) had an auto washer (but no dryer) around 1948.
 
Damaged Goods said:
That's surprising because I'm sure your mom was far younger than Nana (b.1892) and thus more attuned to modern things. My mom (b. 1921) had an auto washer (but no dryer) around 1948.
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That's incredible!

I recall my mom getting her first automatic electric washing machine in and around 1970 (give or take a little on either side), and it was around the same time that she got her first electric tumble dryer.
 
Was just giving thought to all of the babysitting I did growing up. I started babysitting outside the family home in the early 70's, and there wasn't a household around that I knew of where good old-fashioned cloth diapers weren't being used. No disposables whatsoever, every kid I sat wore cloth diapers, and the same applied at home with my baby siblings.

Had two baby sisters (both in diapers at the time - early 70's), and my mom had both in cloth diapers. Same for my baby brother born in 1973, cloth diapers and rubber pants until he was trained. Not a single disposable diaper used.

By no means am I looking to frown upon mothers for using disposables, but having raised 6 children of my own in old-timey cloth diapers, I just don't understand what happened to the days of using cloth diapers and safety pins.
 
We went from the 40s & 50s to a "throw away" society. Litter was everywhere and the environment went to XXXX. Suddenly we saw what we were doing and despite stiff resistance that still exists today we began to change our trash habits. Sadly, many countries still ignore the environment.
 
We recycle everything we can. What bugs me is whenever there's a crisis, the government trucks in pallets and pallets of bottled water. All that plastic waste is disheartening. Why not truck in some water tanks and give people refillable jugs? Do these bottled water companies have powerful lobbyists in Washington to keep all that waste flowing?
 

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