Butter wrappers. Tiny, shiny agents of chaos lurking in the fridge door. You can have a meticulously colour-coded recycling system in place – cardboard with cardboard, glass with glass, plastics sorted by the arcane code of little triangles – and then along comes a Lidl butter wrapper, smirking like a trickster god.
Paper? Well yes, but also no. Foil? Sort of, but not really. Plastic? A whisper, perhaps, like the faint trace of garlic in a pan that’s been “washed.” The thing is a laminated identity crisis. And our local council, who can tell the difference between brown paper and white paper with Jesuitical precision, suddenly throws up its hands and says: “Oh, that? Just bin it.”
And here’s the rub – we recycle almost everything. Glass jars stripped bare, tin cans washed until you could eat your dinner out of them, cardboard flattened flatter than Nigel Farage’s principles. Yet this piddling wrapper defeats us. Every time I unwrap the butter, my conscience starts nagging. Am I an eco-criminal if I put it in the black bin? Will my grandchildren curse me as the man who saved the planet right up until he didn’t know what to do with Lidl butter?
So, I sit there, paralysed, butter knife in hand, torn between fridge, bin, and recycling box, while the wrapper mocks me with its shiny, unclassifiable grin. It’s not so much food packaging as a moral test.
Perhaps the only answer is to smear it with the last scraping of butter, fold it up neatly, and post it to the Council Offices with a note: “You deal with it. I’ve done my bit.”
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