Trash Talk

One thing I've been thinking about is these Euro stores here in Ireland. I don't know if they are common in other places as well, but Dublin seems to be full of them. I gotta tell you though; I love'm. In my own selfish way, I really love going into a store that sells everything imaginable for a price of maximum 1.5 euro. It is brilliant. I feel so great after buying a whole bag of shit I don't need for the price it would cost me to buy 1 item of something I actually need.

Although what you don't think about when you do the happy dance out of the store with a brown bag full of shit you'll never use is that this store, this chain of stores, is one of the biggest environmental fuck ups.

We don't have these in Sweden, so at first I was amazed and deadly excited. Me and my roomies went to all different types of them: The 2 euro store, the 1.50 store and we even found a 99c store. We pimped our rooms with cheap stuff and bought all our kitchen supplies from there, since it was practically free. But of course, as you can assume when you buy something for less than a euro, the quality of the items are shit. Some of them break while you unwrap them, that's how great they are.

So here we got a chain of stores that sell stuff that break in a minute, but the stuff is so cheap that you wouldn't have the energy to go back to the store and return it, so you just throw it away. You might even try to buy a new one at another euro store, maybe the 2 euro store has better quality, I mean it is 50 cent more, there's got to be some difference, right?

Of course it is not. Of course you have to throw away anything that comes from an euro store sooner or later. You would probably save money getting real knives and plates from proper stores. They would cost more at the moment but they wold hold for such a longer period of time, so you wouldn't have to get new ones every months and then you wouldn't make the mountains of garbage we humans so nicely burn or bury underneath the ground grow more than necessary.

What I've noticed here that is different from Sweden is the fact that people don't seem to separate their garbage. They just throw it all (food, cans, plastic stuff, glass and even electronics) in the same big bin and leave it for the garbage men. I don't even think I've seen a recycling station here, come to think about it. Maybe there are none?

This really bugs me. I am used to recycling my cans, to separating my garbage and turn in my used up batteries at the battery section. Before I came here I thought the people in Sweden were unaware bastards who didn't care enough about the environment, but now that I've lived here for 3 months, Sweden looks an environmental angel. In that sense I would pick Sweden over Ireland any day, oh my sweet green paradise.