Plastic in a PET bottle

Not being much of a consumer I tend to stay clear away from anything that resembles a place where there is a lot of frenzied activity of goods being pawed off shelves and thrown into trolleys. Or places where a lot of Chinese junk is displayed, plastic or otherwise - challenging, but best left as another story for another blog.

I had dragged myself off to the the nearest Pick 'n Pay last Sunday, whilst the neighbours across the river were having their weekly bible-punching, drum-banging, tongue-thrashing, lung-busting session. The shopping 'spree' was way overdue anyway; poor old loverboy was living on peanuts and raisins for 3 weeks, and we almost broke up over the last vegetarian sausage.

So there I was, standing absent-mindedly at the beverages in the refrigerator section. Before my very eyes I saw something that looked like baby upchuck. In a bottle. A plastic one, what do you expect. Flavoured. Strawberry and banana. Peach, Passion Fruit and Citrus. I shan't go on lest I lose my appetite.

Give me a break. Who in their right minds firstly came up with the lame idea of bottling cow's milk with fruit chaos and calling it smoothies, and secondly, concocted those combinations? Whatever happened to simplicity? The art of subtlety has ridden off into the sunset. And never mind that... The whole affair gave me a spasm, those bottles - standing there all neatly in rows like little soldiers with bland, badly-designed uniforms, all in need of a good night out and sex with a prostitute.

It started off with bottled water. Then as if to add insult to injury: flavoured, bottled water. Then iced tea. And inbetween, before and after - a pandora's plastic box full of equally horrendous ideas all poured and crammed into polyethylene terephthalate bottles for our consumering pleasure. Why thank you so f*#%ing much and now... ta-rah! we now have the drink that everyone has been waiting for. Except that, you know... smoothies should be whizzed up with fresh fruit and poured over the rocks into long tall glasses, garnished with mint and sipped through a straw. And if you can't have it that way then it's best that you don't have it at all.

So this incident led me to think once again, where will we ever stop with the packaging already? On the one hand we are urged to reduce, reuse and recycle; on the other hand we are handed almost everything in a plastic container. It's all very confusing really, because I for one would like to support retailers who make a concerted effort to go green, but when you pause to look at the details, all they are doing is greenwashing. I would rather support those who make no promises or mention green, than those like Woolworth's who shout it from the rooftops and yet still their products are dressed up to kill.

With such intelligent minds in our midst who can conceive of life-changing ideas as smoothies in a bottle, nevermind that it might taste like plastic, perhaps they should focus their energies on more environmentally-friendly package design, because even though that PET bottle is recyclable, the first R is Reduce.