#WordWeavers 2025.10.07 — How does the world your characters inhabit deal with garbage?
Glad you asked! This is a deep background feature that's an Easter egg in all the Reluctance Series stories.
Plastic does not exist, nor do fossil fuels. Instead they use organic compostable material and things like wax. As a result, other than glass, there is no transparent packaging, only translucent. Everything is made from wood, wood by-products, natural fiber, metal, vegetable oils, glass, rock, minerals, cement, and ceramic. What they rely on for energy instead of electricity does allow the creation of some exotic materials, but nothing that can't be rendered down and reused. Electronics don't exist, despite it being an Interstellar civilization. When you visit a grocer, you either buy containers or bring your own. A grocery is a combination of bulk bins you'd find in a bulk store, a produce market, and shelves stocked with bottles, tins, cans, and boxes. Cooked or prepared food will be wrapped in wax paper or Chinese-style folding boxes (typically for takeaway meals), or foil wrapped. Takeaway drinks come in paper, sometimes waxed. Pure water is free, spigots are ubiquitous, and everyone carries a metal or water-proof fabric flask. (It is horribly hot by our standards so everyone sweats; water is a health issue.) Even clothing is reducible; rayon, silk, and rarely leather versus our nylon. People routinely clean discards; everything is rendered and reused. People do that work to earn coin.
Reusable containers and objects, and recycling, are never detailed in the stories other than in passing. You might see someone washing something before tossing it, or opening a Chinese-style folding box (instead of a styrofoam clamshell) and pulling chopsticks from their hair to use them. It might seem like a colorful detail, but it is part of a world free of human created forever-trash.
Editorial Note: It amazes me how even the most recyclable packaging will contain some tiny bit that isn't recyclable: cellophane or a plastic transparent covering, or plastic bits inside caps, for instance a plastic spout in a glass vinegar bottle. Spray cans used to be metal, even the top and sprayer. Even consumer friendly stores that routinely work with suppliers to produce unique products, for example Trader Joe's, repeatedly market new items in completely non-recyclable packaging that could obviously be made recyclable if they insisted. Cheap, easy, and irresponsible end-of-life handling will eventually render the Earth into a rubbish heap. We should be holding packaging companies responsible for end-of-life disposal cost (arguably the material's greatest expense). Such pressures would force them to invent reusable recyclable packaging. /End of editorial.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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