There's a problem in the UK. Well, yeah, OK there's more than one, but there's one I want to talk about today. We're running out of landfill space. Quickly. So a few years back local councils started to be measured on the effectiveness of their recycling policies.
As you might expect in Blair's Britain, there was no uniform policy decided from the centre and filtered down to each authority. No that would have been too simple. Never mind that this is supposed to be about the environment, so having everyone do it the same way might have involved some economies of scale?
My Mum, for example, only lives 70 miles away but her scheme is different from ours - a bin for garden waste, one for metal, one for everything else. And although they don't supply a bin for it, she's supposed to separate out the paper and glass too. With our scheme we get a brown bin for glass, blue for paper, and the big grey one for everything else. Metal? No thanks we can't be bothered with that, despite the fact that it's one of the easiest things to recycle AND one of the costliest to produce in environmental impact terms.
So that's how it was until a week or so ago when we were leafleted about "kerbit green." We're to be supplied with a new green bin for garden waste. Whoopee. We're lucky though: we have a long path down the side of the house where all these bins can live. People with smaller houses, no paths or no front garden have a real problem finding somewhere to store the increasing number of recycle bins they need. Besides, anyone who has a garden can compost, so what's the point of taking it away?
Reading the fine print though, you have to doubt the council's green credentials. Here's an excerpt from the leaflet explaining what the green bin is and how we're supposed to use it.
"You can start to use your kerbit green bin for garden waste as soon as it arrives. If you do not produce any garden waste please contact Environment On Call once your bin has been delivered to arrange for it to be removed."
Hahahaha!! So these environmentally conscious council plonkers are going to send a big smelly fume-belching diesel truck loaded with bins out to the houses of people who don't want them, and then send the truck out again to fetch them back. Good grief. Just had to share that with you.
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2 comments:
We have a green bin for compost and a little green one for the kitchen to carry it out to the big one. In an apartment building though, we have a huge skip in the underground parking area and i just take the kitchen one and empty it into that. We all recycle other stuff too. Newspaper and cardboard in one bag, glass, tin, some plastics go in a blue clear binbag.
hmmm that post gave my nick a blogger identity but i don't think i have one. someone else might though. I didn't use the "other" radio button :) just in case you were wondering.
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