Our local council has just decided to split the recycling collections again, meaning on recycling day we have to put out up to five different containers. When will this lunacy end?
A short history:-
We started off with a brown bin for garden waste and cardboard, a blue box for plastics, cans and glass, a blue bag for paper and a red bag for textiles.
Very quickly the council decided that lids were needed for the boxes, so these were issued. More boxes were handed out to people as they were not large enough to hold all the recycling!
The blue boxes were then scrapped (not being made of recyclable materials!!) and blue bins were issued instead.
So far so good except that putting paper in a bag quite often meant it blew all over the place when the wind got up.
Now we have been issued with orange bags for cardboard - as with the paper collection this either becomes a sodden mess when it rains or will blow around if the wind gets up.
The situation gets worse of course because we now have four lorries on recycling day - brown bin, blue bin, paper/textiles and cardboard. How can this be good for the environment?
Add to that the fact that with the bags for paper we find a lot of them blowing away after being emptied because they are not securely returned by the refuse crews. This will now be added to by the new bags. Two problems arise here, firstly they are made of plastic so litter the country side and do not biodegrade, secondly they have to be replaced.
Some people, myself included, have reused the old blue boxes for paper. This may not work for card because the crews will not easily see the difference (lids on to prevent rubbish blowing everywhere)
Why can we not follow the lead of Europe, where recycling is collected in one bin and sorted at the recycling centre - the technology exists to do this nowadays and that which cannot be done automatically will create employment?
Ah yes, we have blue wheelie bins for cardboard, metal and glass, green wheelie bins for garden rubbish(how can anything grown in a garden actually be 'rubbish' as it could all be used for compost in one's own garden), tiny orange bins for waste food, and black wheelie bins for everything else. We have two lots of bin wagons that pickup and they come on Fridays for me and my neighbours on the left and Tuesdays for my neighbours on my right!!! If any bin is slightly more full than allows the lid not to be fully closed they - by law - are not allowed to empty the bin. If we forget to put the bins out by the road, they will not walk the 5 yards to fetch it. I remember the days when we all had those really heavy metal bins, and the binmen used to come all the way up the long garden path to fetch it and take it all the way down again and then bring it back up again without so much as a murmer. However, I am grateful for them still as where would we be without our refuse collectors, and it can't be a very nice job to do, and must skew their view of how people are as people do leave the most appalling things in their bins without making any attempts to wrap them up in newspaper etc...
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