Let's cut down on recycling and bring back the humble flask

We could do with a few more flasks, writes Colm O’Regan

WHAT happened to it? How come the nostalgia merchants haven’t brought it back along with all the rest of the stuff from the 1980s, like leg-warmers and the threat of nuclear war.

I’m talking about the flask. They used to be everywhere: in offices, building sites, or leaking slightly in a schoolbag so that a Busy at Maths smelled of Cup-a-Soup for the Winter. Of course they were grim times — when the workplace canteen was a chair next to the mop and most shops were barren, a bit Soviet. You half expected Elton John, singing Nikita, to come and rescue you.

No one wants a return to those days. But we could do with a few more flasks.

Because of the coffee cups. This isn’t a tirade against coffee. Even though privately I believe “that there’s too much oul talk about coffee and everyone should shut up about it. Instant’ll have to do you because no one drinks coffee in this house.” But I am not here to create a schism between coffee and tea drinkers. After the last eight months we’ve had, now is not the time for more division. It is not a zero-sum game. We can make Arabica great again.

It’s the takeaway cups. Britain throws away 2.5 billion of them every year, so we’re probably ditching a couple of hundred million. I’m not lecturing. I’m talking about myself too. (Now, normally when somebody says “and I’m saying this to myself as much as you” actually it’s all about you” but this time it is about me.) I realised just how bad I’d got recently when I bought two cups of tea in a takeaway cup about 500 yards from my own house. And the lids. And a holder. I could hear the planet sobbing quietly in the corner. They’re sort-of recyclable but most end up in land-fill. It’s just an example of the quiet, civilised way that we are making pure shite of the world while lecturing some subsistence farmer in Madagascar for having the temerity to forage for timber for cooking.

We did it with the plastic bags. Let’s do it with the takeaway cups. Pay for the crappy things! If 22 cent was all it took to stop hoarding enough bags to need an extension, surely a similar amount would get people to remember to bring with them, the promotional reusable coffee cup “that was the only decent thing they got in that goodie bag that time”.

And while I’m at it, the paper bags we get ‘feel wrong’ too. We’ve replaced the Trump of the plastic bag with the insidious Mike Pence of the elaborate paper bag. I know the story. Shopping somewhere swanky like Brown Thomas is stressful because you’ve gone in there wearing trousers that you’ve just realised has ‘baby’ on them. You try to browse casually even though the price makes your Christmas gift voucher wither like a cursed flower. So you’re damned if you’re not going to enjoy showing off the bag.

But then you get home. The bag which told strangers you were doing well, goes under the stairs with one hundred other mostly useless paper bags or straight into the green bin. OK it goes off to recycling but the electricity for that probably comes from burning bits of rare Offaly wetlands habitat. And you threw away the receipt that was stapled — with steel! There are so many casual things we could easily cut back on. The tens of thousands of bad photos of events such as Gary-Who-You-Barely-Knew’s Leaving Drinks and the blurry back of a bride going down the aisle in poor lighting. All stored on data farms which need power, mined minerals and plastic.

The thought of it is enough to drive anyone to drink. Where’s my hip-flask?