Laid Waste
Posted: Thu 17 August, 2023 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Green 4 Comments »One of the (admittedly silly) things I’m generally proud of is how comparatively little non-recyclable waste I generate here. When it comes to my bin-collection days, I’m usually quite surprised by how full the bins of my neighbours are in comparison.
Now admittedly the other households usually have more people in, and I take that into account – but all the same, those bins are filled to the brim most fortnights.
Mine seems to generally work out as one bag per fortnight, so I generally (unless it’s been stupidly warm, in which case I’d rather be rid) actually only put that bin out every other fortnight – and even then, it’s nowhere near full. I could probably get away with only putting it out every six weeks, to be honest.
On the other hand, I’d be considerably more stuffed if I forgot to put the recycling stuff out for collection. (I base that on knowledge, I messed up one day and missed it when the collection came far earlier than usual, and it was a pain in the bits to catch up!)
I know that, all things considered, it means precisely cock-all. But I’m still happy that I’m not landfilling much stuff at all. (Obviously most of my carbon footprint is taken up with idiot drives, rather than the waste I generate)
Down south we generated pretty much the same amount for 2 of us. Up here we make a whole bin full every 2 weeks, because the tip (a 30 mile round trip away) charges for recycling many things, so we smuggle them into the black (ladfill) bin! As we live in the middle of nowhere the bin men don’t seem to inspect things as much as they do in the villages and towns. Fortunately.
When we lived down south it was always people with kids who made most landfill rubbish. Oh the irony.
Yeah, the whole “tip charges for stuff” thing really steams my piss.
While I was down in Milton Keynes, my nearest actual tip was a five mile trip, but was in a different council, who would then try to charge me for out-of-area etc. The nearest one in the same council area as me was a 20-ish mile trip (each way) And then *both* of those councils were complaining about having to spend so much more on cleaning up fly-tipped waste. There seemed to be no-one making the correlation between those two things!
I was also surprised this week to see that there’ve been changes in bulky-waste collections recently, so soft furnishing (chairs, sofas, sofa-beds etc.) now *have* to be incinerated. Again, how the *fuck* is that a greener alternative?!?
Totally agree.
Up here all ‘landfill’ waste (which includes many things that are recyclable elsewhere – including all plastics except bottles, all scrap textiles) is send to Teeside for incineration/electricity generation. People laugh when you say, “What about the people who live there and all the fumes they have to breathe?” One council offical even said to me, “Well, people don’t have to live in Teeside!”
Honestly, it’s a total joke here and from being an ardent advocate of recycling (from the age of 5 when we did kerbside newspaper recycling once a month for the guides/scouts funds) I almost can’t be bothered any more.
Yeah – when I was just outside Milton Keynes a new incinerator was built in the next village along, and all the NIMBYs came out in force, whining about the pollution/fumes etc.
It was made very clear that
a) the chimney that they were moaning about had better particle filtration than a hoover
b) when they were complaining during commissioning about the smoke and how they “couldn’t breathe” they had been steam-cleaning the inside of the chimney, the furnace hadn’t been fully commissioned and signed off yet.
and
c) You’re in a village in a corner between the A421 and the M1 – any possible pollution from the plant was far outweighed by the daily stuff from road traffic.
I’d honestly rather it went to incineration and regeneration than landfill. (A lot of the land around that area was also ex-landfill, and fitted with *so* many methane detectors and collection systems, it was fucking ridiculous)