Wasting Away

For The Chaser's Craig Reucassel, sifting through bins for his new TV series on rubbish made him realise why we must wage war on waste.

- Craig Reucassel

In Australia, our waste is growing each year at twice the rate of our population. As goods have become cheaper, they’ve lost value to many of us, so we tend to just throw them away and get a new one.

It’s a lot easier than repairing. And who needs to wear a shirt 100 times if it only costs 10 bucks? I wonder if we could see the energy, water and chemicals that go into making us a simple shirt, whether we’d be so quick to throw it out because we’d given it a few wears.

A banana tree, for instance, grows for nine months to bring us fruit. But if the fruit is too big or small, or not curved the right way to meet cosmetic standards, then it’s often thrown away on the farm. When we visited banana farms in North Queensland, we saw it happen and it is very confronting to see so much edible food thrown away.