As I drove along the city streets lined with overflowing green garbage bins and the bright yellow lidded recyclable bins, I remembered when Gympie had the small metal bins.

Householders were not required to take these bins to the kerbside. Rather the garbage men would swing an empty bin on their shoulders, jump off the running board on the side of the truck and run into the property to empty the rubbish from one bin to the other. Possibly on the way out a ripe mango would find its way into the spare hand of the garbage man but people generally didn’t object to this. The garbage would then be hoisted up and over into the truck. The One Mile sporting grounds that we have now was the tip for many years until the final vision for the area came to fruition.

Isn’t it amazing that all the rubbish used to fit into that small bin? Remember though that the food scraps were feed to the chooks in the back yard and the meat scraps went to the cat or the dog. All the rubbish was wrapped tightly in newspapers rather than the plastic bags used now. As for take away food cartons, the only real take away food was perhaps fish and chips from Harry’s on Apollonian Vale. There were certainly no pizza cartons when I was a girl. Soft drinks were for special occasions and fruit juice was when you squeezed oranges by hand. The milk was delivered in glass bottles so there were no plastic bottles in the rubbish. Empty boxes were reused for storage.
Our lifestyle has changed and so it appears has our rubbish.

By Dianne