Janetta Mackay: Trying to be a tidy Kiwi

A giant helium-filled balloon with feathers, accompanying a delivery of hair oil. Picture / Janetta Mackay

The footpath on my street is littered with the discards of the white van people. It's inorganic collection time and the neat piles of old junk put out over the weekend have been ferreted through and spread about. Sure, it's an eyesore, but I don't mind that much. Just think of it as annual community recycling, rather than out-of-suburb casing of your neighbourhood.

Over the years, I've salvaged the odd thing myself, although I don't cruise the streets with a trailer. But I do look when I drive by because the inorganic collection is a great chance to check out what not to buy if you want your garden, office and house furniture to have any longevity.

Amazingly, our household hasn't put out anything out this collection, mostly thanks to a whopping clean-out last year. The suitcase with the dodgy lock will doubtless have to go next year, but I'm hoping it will hold together for a bit longer.

Week-by-week I contribute more than my fair share to the council recycling collection. I blame my job as beauty editor, which involves plenty of deliveries in large boxes of bubble wrap. Perhaps because I feel guilty about this, I take a benign view of the roadside scavengers. Although they are often needlessly messy they must surely cut the amount the council has to haul away and dump. Better to re-use than discard, as we all too often do.

As New Zealanders we could definitely do more to cut back our household waste and the littering of our landscape. I'm not getting all preachy on you, it's the guilt talking. I don't compost, I don't take enough re-usable bags to the supermarket and every fortnight a stack of flattened cardboard boxes and branded bags hit my patch of pavement.

When I visit friends overseas, I am often struck by how much more diligently they sort stuff for rubbish recycling. By how their highways are less littered, having been "adopted" by groups who clean up the wayside. Shops are increasingly switching back to paper bags, or charging you for plastic ones, often recyclable or biodegradable. I'd like to see more government and council action to enforce changes we all know we need to make.

My personal plea is to those kind PR people who send me their products to review. Some do consider the environment, but in an effort to stand out from the pack, others make me look like a mad shopping fiend. The local op shops happily take my unwanted bubble wrap, but no thanks to the golf-ball sized variety. I'm never short of pretty ribbons to tie presents with, but sometimes I'm left at a loss. Shredded straw stuff and polystyrene chips are forever bursting out of boxes and I routinely stab myself on bags stapled together. Some of this packaging is necessary, but other times it's simply excessive and it really makes no difference to how I rate whatever is buried beneath.

In the past week, I have received a giant helium-filled balloon filled with feathers tied to a small bag containing a hair oil and a giant tile-sized box replica of a Hollywood star with my name on it and a perfume bottle in centre spot. Who could resist their own Hollywood star - though heaven knows where I will put the box - but what do to with the damn balloon? If I pop it now, there will be feathers everywhere and unless I leave it to shrink for a few weeks it won't be containable into a rubbish bag for mess-free disposal. Either way it is all surplus landfill.

- VIVA