According to our local authority, we ratepayers are recycling more, but many of us are not recycling right.
Now the powers-that-be have issued a warning that, unless we dispose of our refuse in the approved manner, we’re to be publicly shamed by a big notice stuck on the offending bin.
This recycling regime is doing my head in. I never remember whether its a blue or a black bin week and have to trek down the drive with a torch the night before to discover which colour my virtuous neighbours have left out, or else rise at stupid-o’clock and trail to the gate in the rain and my dressing-gown because the lorry comes round at the scrake of dawn.
Being a suburban road, we’ve only recently been issued with the little brown bucket and even smaller brown food-waste caddy. These have merely compounded my confusion. I’m a household of one, with a moderate appetite. The caddy’s the size of a child’s seaside pail I could fill in a single day, the other, the dimensions of a mop-bucket. How does the average-sized family manage?
Both receptacles come with a list of ‘acceptable’ waste, which forbids the disposal of cooking oils and liquid fats. What am I supposed to do with them? I’ve just paid a man to unblock my sink and outside drain and he ate the face off me for putting either down the plughole. The biodegradable bags supplied for food waste are too small, very flimsy and easily punctured by chicken or chop bones. Also, they’re porous, so you have to use them double and impossibly awkward to tie without getting cold porridge up your sleeve. My futility-room door is nearly off its hinges as I flit dementedly between bins black, blue and brown.
We live in an era of excess, of over-packaging, of conspicuous waste, smothering the land and polluting the seas. Apropos of nothing, the biscuits I’m mindlessly munching as I write this, come in individual wrappers on a moulded plastic tray inside a cellophane sleeve, inside a cardboard box. There are six of them. Well, there were…
A recent press article alerts me that “landfill has increased by 84 per cent over the past four years,” and the list of items “extremely difficult if not impossible to recycle”, is as long as your arm. It includes black plastic ready-meal trays, biros, blister pill packs, broken wine glasses, coffee pods, carrier bags, cigarette ends, cling film, crisp packets and cleaning sprays; (pause for breath) freezer bags, foil pouches, glitter-spattered greetings cards, light bulbs, mirrors, nail varnish bottles, soap-dispensers and toothpaste tubes. Well, who knew? Cue, on my part, a hasty and malodorous rubber-gloved, kitchen-tonged rearrangement of the week’s rubbish. Being a scrupulously civic-minded, morally upright friend of the earth is extremely messy and utterly exhausting.
In less ecologically-friendly days, our general household waste, including hot ashes, was disposed of in a stout galvanized metal bin which stood in the backyard. When it got too full, we simply set fire to its contents. On collection day the rumble of the bin lorry galvanized my mother into laying down the double sheets of the Irish News from front door to back. The brawny binman tramped through, the bin hoisted on his shoulder and returned it to the yard with an almighty clang and a couple of dinges.
As for the covered bucket of food scraps that stood at the back door, the ‘brock man’ came around the streets in an open cart drawn by a depressed-looking horse, its appearance heralded by the stench, the clanking of buckets strung along its sides and accompanied by a buzzing halo of bluebottles. You went out with your brock bucket and heeled its contents onto the slimy, stinking mound of food waste in the cart as it trundled slowly by – for it didn’t stop. How long will it be before we ‘Derry wans’ christen the wee brown bin ‘the brock bucket’?
