Some ideas are so obvious that it can only be their very obviousness that has stopped them being thought of before. A charity called Hubbub suggests that we take our own plastic containers along when we buy takeaway food. To incentivise us, we should get a discount on the food we buy. I agree with every aspect of this, other than that I personally wouldn’t want a discount. Because I would be only too happy to show off my absolutely world-class Tupperware collection on a daily basis. This is the moment I have been waiting for. I will be very pleased to pass on my discount to the customer behind me in the queue. They will want the money to buy themselves some better containers, for once they’ve seen mine, their whole bodies will throb with envy.

I go back a long way with plastics. My mum is from Zagreb, born and raised in what was the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, where plastic products were cherished. The notion of single-use plastic – single-use anything, for that matter – didn’t really exist. As the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić points out in her masterpiece, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, nobody had any choice but to be environmentally sound: everything had to be recycled or, more accurately, re-used.

And my mum didn’t leave that habit at home when she came to Britain to meet my dad, have children and set up home in the West Midlands. I never recall drinking squash from anything other than old yoghurt pots as a kid. Why, they even had a little groove about a centimetre up from the bottom, a perfect guide to how much concentrate to put in there before adding water.

To this day, my mum’s plastic pot collection is unrivalled. Week after week, the recycling collector man walks up her drive, peers into the bin, shakes his head and walks away sadly. Empty again. Inside, the kitchen shelves groan with pots and tubs, some years old. Only yesterday I covertly binned an ice-cream tub so old I could no longer read what flavour it once held.

Her habits were passed down a generation to me. For years I tried to throw away little plastic pots but my hand shook as it hovered over the recycling bin. Disposal seemed disloyal to my mum, the planet and everything in between. Then, one day last year, rummaging through my own collection of the stuff, I dislodged a key piece in this game of plastic pot Jenga and the whole edifice came down, pots and tubs bouncing all over the kitchen floor. This had to stop. I filled two recycling bags. At 50 years of age, I felt as if I had reached adulthood.

I have transferred all my love to Tupperware. I counted 24 empty examples in various sizes this morning, along with 24 matching lids. Furthermore, at each washing I remove the plastic seals from the lids and clean those separately. If, mysteriously and upsettingly, I can’t find a lid for a tub, or a tub for a lid, the offending piece is stored in my widows-and-orphans box. Sometimes a missing tub or lid turns up and there is an emotional reunion with no small ceremony. These things are important to me.