Recycling

Over the course of this year, I’ve got more and more into recycling and general Green stuff. I’ve always been into it to a degree, but I found that while living in Manchester it was something that was seriously difficult to do, as there were no decent local recycling banks, and the paper-recycling collection was – well, sporadic, to say the least. In fact, there was little to no chance to recycle stuff while I lived there – something I hope has changed a bit now, but while I was there it was definitely difficult to do.

Since moving to Bracknell though, it’s become a lot easier. First of all, the council actually do a regular collection of recyclable stuff, and just that simple fact makes it all a lot easier. We can get rid of all our cardboard, paper, and plastics in this way, and they collect once a fortnight. On the alternate weeks, they do a “garden waste” collection, which goes off to be composted – although they charge for the bags in which to put the waste, which always strikes me as a bit of a scam, considering the amount we’re already paying for council tax, which includes rubbish collection. Still, we don’t use that one that much, as most of our garden waste goes back on the compost heap anyway.

Herself is also a fairly avid recycler and so on, so the garden already had a serious compost heap (well, one of the plastic compost bins, which then ended up being two bins as one was always full, and has now become a proper heap in its own container) where most of the garden waste and raw food waste went (veg peelings and the like) and the basic stuff was already in place, containers for the plastics, papers, etc., so in that way as well it’s now a lot easier to do the recycling stuff than before.

Of late, we’ve also been watching the BBC series “No Waste Like Home“, which has made for interesting viewing, and helped to show just how much people in general chuck away that can be recycled.

As a result, we’ve also just bought a wormery from a company called Wiggly Wigglers (I swear I’m not making this up) which will also help on breaking down food waste (both cooked and raw) into decent compost. We set it up last night, and so far it’s all looking pretty good.

I’m sure there’ll be more posts about this kind of thing as time goes on, so I’m also going to add in a new category, just titled “Green”.