My Thoughts Exactly   (4)

 

 

Recycling?   -     Rubbish!

 

Does anyone hate recycling as much as I do?

The younger generation seem to have taken it in their stride. They DRIVE to the bottle bank, paper collection point, shoe bins, clothing bins etc!

At home, we have green bins, brown bins, black bins, and blue boxes. And a compost bin in the garden. Every shopping trip yields more waste packaging to fill them all! And, as well as junk mail, the Council contributes to each and every household regular lists of ‘do’s and don’ts accompanied by large red crosses. These are to indicate items which must not enter the green (recycling) bin! (On pain of death?) Waste is collected fortnightly now, or ‘alternate weeks’ as the Council coyly puts it!

 

Let me tell you, ‘recycling’ is nothing new! When I was young the kitchen fire, that also heated the oven, and the water, was used to burn practically anything. Well, absolutely anything until the ‘new’ plastics arrived on the scene! The only drawback was that occasionally a chimney ‘caught fire’, an event of great excitement to us kids!

A dopey-looking lad came round with a bucket, asking for food scraps for the pigs kept locally.  Not that he got much apart from vegetable peelings from my mother! Nothing was wasted as far as food went! We had no fridge to accumulate ‘out-of-date’ concoctions.  In fact ‘sell-by-date’ had no meaning! Food was bought fresh and quickly demolished by hungry families on a daily basis.  Butcher, baker, and fishmonger came to us on a regular basis.  Youngsters went door-to-door with fresh produce straight from the family allotment’s surpluses.

In any case local shops were only a short walk away and were kept pretty clean and tidy.  Early morning saw shop frontages being individually swept, and evening closing was followed by the same areas being swilled-down with water, and swept again, the water running down sloping gutters into well-maintained drains.

Rag and Bone men made their collections in return for clothes pegs, balloons, and goldfish! (Our pair of goldfish survived for many a year!) Scrap metal merchants came sometimes too, and lifted out heavier items, in exchange for a few coppers, or shillings if you were lucky!

Glass bottles (‘pop’ bottles) were greatly treasured as these were ‘on deposit’, and could be returned to the shop in exchange for a few pence.  We kids collected them avidly in the hopes of raising enough for a bag of chips between us! We sometimes had to ‘haggle’ as some shopkeepers insisted ‘said bottle’ had not been purchased from them! Sometimes our protests worked; but otherwise we became ‘detectives’ and tracked down the appropriate shop premises to redeem our bottles to! Nowadays Health and Safety would put paid to that little enterprise! Yet no-one got injured and I truly cannot remember seeing broken glass everywhere.  There was ‘personal profit’ in it, so we took great care.

We had only one bin and it was made of metal. All it ever contained was ashes!

If only the ‘powers that be’ had sought more efficient clean-air strategies for the burning of rubbish instead of the horrific use of landfill sites we would not have all these problems.

Recycling does not save energy; it merely creates wealth for the Councils which is not passed on to the public.  (Has your community charge gone down?)

 

I stand in my kitchen, sorting out bags of this and bags of that, referring to lists of what should go where and realise that recycling uses up too much energy – my energy!

Evelyn Arlsan