Waste not want not!

Consumption as an idea in some green groups has become perceived as a dirty word- synonymous with waste, squandering self interest.

However, for most people rushing around the super market between school and dinner time, modern living has become a comfortably developed a well oiled consumer machine. Consume and the economy will dig itself out of the hole its get itself into.

When you hear the stories of London Councils shipping carefully sorted 'recycling' off to Asia, and you consider the sheer tonnage of waste we Brits chuck out you can't help feel that perhaps that there is some truth in the greenies vitriol.

So where did it go wrong? Consumption thirty years ago was a different kind of concept all together. Individual consumption would have comfortably been off set by those things which we 'gave back'. The odd pair of jeans sewn back together, the odd cabbage or two grown in the garden.

The world in more recent decades has escalated into an unnerving hamster wheel of self-designed spending buy cheap plastic soled shoes you can't resole as you'll only want a new pair in six months. Success and life satisfaction now equate to the number of receipts squashed into your wallet and the postal deliveries from online stores stacked up at your door.

The cult of consumption has now reached a point at which those who would like to choose differently will struggle to do so. Remember the days of getting the odd metre or two of cable or wire from your local electrician, leather bag repaired or getting a new handle made for your hammer? I suspect a large percentage of us hypnotized by the glossy pictures in the magazines, reality television shows and incessant messaging on so many bits of advertising will find it hard to remember.

Though we may laugh at the pantomime of reality television subconsciously there is a message which is being beaten into the brain encouraging us (however cynical we may be) to believe that if we spend we will be happier, if we buy certain products we will be more of the person we aspire to be, and have all those bits of our lives we don't like magically transformed.

Though our rational brains know that this is decidedly doubtful and we know the purchase of a Gucci handbag is not going to suddenly transform a plump middle aged housewife into Kate Moss there is a part of our brain which loves to be deluded, and for five minutes with credit card in hand we really feel that we are achieving just a little slice of that better life.

Now this obsession is reaching unmanageable proportions a tipping point is on the horizon. Its long overdue, but there are those who do realise that if we continue to consume at the rate we currently are, we will find ourselves wading in our own waste.

So lets bring back a bit of a hearty enterprising economy and reuse a bit more, waste a bit less, become a bit more individual and live a bit more.