Moving goods

Pallets (at least once they've dried out from the wettest January on record) are quite sought after by the scavenging fringe of the wood-burning-stove-owning middle class. Obviously. There's a worthwhile amount of sturdy wood in them.

And that was about as far as I'd thought about them until my camera made me contemplate. The ones that come into my possession have been abandoned or donated but seem to me to have plenty of life left in them. And as well as the timber they contain the value of the maker's labour. So why are they abandoned to firewood rather than re-used?

I guess it's the same process that makes us put milk in single-use plastic milk bottles, transport packets of biscuits from warehouse to shop in cardboard boxes that get flattened and pulped, and buy take-aways in plastic and film and cardboard and paper then feel virtuous when some of the packaging is eligible for the recycling bin.

It's dismal when you stop to think about it. One day, I guess, we'll be seen to be the decadent and profligate wasters we really are.