Philobiblon

It struck me the other day how hard it is to buy liquid handsoap in an environmentally friendly way – even brands like Ecover and Waitrose, which should know better, don’t seem to sell (anywhere I can find anyway), refill bottles in which you can just put the old plastic pump thingy on the top.

So each time you buy handwash you buy a new pump: some future archaeologist excavating our rubbish dumps will probably think these were some weird cult item, used in daily ritual practice, due to their ubiquity, their arrival reflecting a sudden new religious trend.

But then I had a brainwave – I bought some bathwash – more than double the quantity for the same price, and am using that as a refill – and so far as I can tell exactly the same stuff.

But I’m going to go further – I’m giving up on bathwash and going back to soap – which when you think about it requires far less, even no, packaging. (Yes, okay it helps that I’m in Nice and bought a heap of lovely local, “all-vegetable” vanilla soaps, sans packaging.)

But this is just one more example of how we’ve gone mad on pointless consumption in the past couple of decades. (I can remember, just, when soap was all there was, arriving probably in a cardboard box, or possibly a thin plastic wrap around a six-pack – back in about 1980.)