Previously I blogged on the wrong fuel. Here I write of too much fuel prompted by a recurring street scene of litter bins overwhelmed by inadequate capacity.

Litter bins first appeared on the streets of Britain in the 1950s, but not because litter was a new problem, as litter has always been a part of human activity.

However, the midden (an old dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, mollusc shells, potsherds, and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation) of the middle ages is no longer suitable in the post-industrial age.

The dawn of the disposable

Since the 1970s disposable items have become increasingly available so that today, in 2021, the litter bins are no sooner emptied than they are full again.

Litter bins have a capacity that has not grown since the first litter bins when they could readily accommodate the most prevalent litter items such as cigarette stubs, sweet wrappers and drink bottles.

Fast-forward 70 years and bins must cope with a much greater volume of waste including poo bags, disposable coffee cups, boxes of beer bottles and numerous cans of energy drinks.

Unlike many things that have grown, including clothing sizes, (I used to be a medium and now my clothing size is small), the capacity of the street bin remains unchanged, and it seems unable to cope with the demands placed on it.

The modern lifestyle

This is a question of quantity and a sad reflection on the modern lifestyle. We are in the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition 2016-2025. A third of the global population is overweight and every other person has fatty liver disease!

Metabolic syndrome is so common a condition that endocrinologist Gerald Reaven named it Syndrome X in 1988 when the world population was just over five billion.

Today it approaches eight billion: almost a billion people are starving, and malnutrition is common amongst the overweight as much as the underweight. But why?

NOVA

There is a food classification system called NOVA developed by researchers at the University of São Paulo that gives a number to foodstuffs according to the amount of processing. It is the so-called foods in Group 4 that are the fundamental problem today:

Group 1: Unprocessed or minimally processed foods – milk and eggs, edible parts of plants and animals

Group 2: Processed culinary ingredients – butter, cheese, salt, sugar and fats

Group 3: Processed foods – tinned foods, adding group 1 to group 2

Group 4: Ultra-processed food and drink products made from reconstituted constituents to produce products that are profitable, durable, and attractive, and often marketed intensively.

Human history’s diet transitions

Bee Wilson, an acclaimed food writer, in her latest book The Way We Eat Now (2021), writes that ‘human history can be considered in a series of diet transitions’.

The idea of these transitions was promoted by professor of nutrition Barry Popkin. In the fifth stage it is hoped a new pattern of restrained eating by behavioural changes will become the norm, water will be the drink of choice and walking and cycling will replace the car in urban spaces).

Meanwhile, the litter bin serves as a prompt to restrain our eating habits: when the bin is full think twice. There is only one world, don’t abuse it or we’ll lose it!