Rubbish and Recycling

Thursday is waste collection day around here. It's always a bit frustrating. We get a fortnightly recycling collection (paper, cardboard, food and drink cans, plastic bottles are collected. Catalogues, phonebooks, plastic packaging other than bottles, and glass of any kind are not accepted). And we get a weekly landfill collection - all kinds of anything, fill yer land 'ere, have a nice big wheelie bin.

The trouble is, we generate twice as much permissible recycling as landfill waste, by volume. And we have a titchy little crate for our fortnightly collection, and a huge great wheelie bin for our weekly collection. So a while ago I went to ask them if we could have a wheelie bin for recycling, and they said yes, but it will take a month or two. And meanwhile we put one lonesome, half-empty bag of landfill in the bottom of our wheelie bin every week, and pile bags and stacks of recyclables on top of our overflowing recycling crate every fortnight. It looks desperately untidy, and makes getting in and out of the doorway a pain (not to mention that the postman must love it; we have to put this stuff out the night before, and the recycling crate has no lid, so we leave it immediately outside the door where there's a small bit of roof to shelter it from the worst of the elements - sorting soggy recycling is a very unpleasant job. It doesn't quite block the letterbox).

I'm trying to get into the habit of taking glass with me when I go to my Aquanatal class on Tuesdays, because there's a glass recycling point behind the pool and it's easier than making a special trip to the closer one behind the hospital. And we have a compost heap for everything that will agree to rot reasonably quickly, or get eaten by birds, cats, or bugs (no mice around here - too many cats for it to be plausible. We saw a dead one two or three years ago, though). I think we might be one of very few households that has two bins in each room, because we have one for recycling and one for general waste, rather than just a random wastepaper bin (I sorted through a bin half full of used tissues once, extracting the recyclables, and that was enough for me, thanks).

Most of our glass gets reused, rather than recycled - I know someone with a seemingly endless need for 750ml broad-necked screw-top bottles, and he gets all our juice bottles. Our milk is delivered in reused bottles from the dairy (though I need to look into the ethics of buying organic milk in recyclable plastic bottles instead; I don't honestly know which produces more useless waste and which causes more overall harm. Almost everything else we eat or drink is from an organic or in-transition supplier, but practically none of it comes in plastic packaging).

Ho hum. Time to go and look into nappies again, I suppose. At least no-one is trying to make me use disposables any more.