One of the joys of domesticity not featured in Ideal Homes magazine includes dealing with garbage. We have a front gardenless terrace so the wheelie bin must sit directly on the street outside our house. I dislike the fact that our front door tends to invite visitors with a cheery “hello and welcome to our wheelie bin” but don’t really have another option. By half way through the week I am also struggling to force the lid shut. Recycling would seem to help (and allow me to polish my conscience in the process) however I’m really put off by the Council’s recycling diktat that all bottles and cans must be washed and labels removed, and complicated instructions as to what can go in where and whether or not to bag what. I don’t mind a bit of effort and am happy to walk a bag of newspapers to the nearest recycling bin but my feminist streak suspects that all this pre-recycling washing and cleaning is just an attempt to keep me busy doing something fairly useless whilst the rest of the world goes on in its normal polluting kind of a way. This suspicion seems to be confirmed when I get to advice on nappies. Happily child-free this doesn’t affect me, but nagging by the authorities for parents (read mothers) to add to their workload through washing revolting nappies seems to belong to the keep the little women busy critique. Oddly in its make parents feel more guilty exhortations the diktat doesn’t mention the debate over whether washing terry towelling – not to mention growing the cotton for it in the first place – is environmentally worse than disposables.
In this enthusiasm for all things recycling the Council have now imposed on us extra wheelie bins for garden waste. I boggle slightly at the wisdom on spending council tax to supply people like us with minimal gardens but am sure at least the issuing of brown bins complete with complicated instructions about what may and may not go in it and a neatly printed collection calendar have no doubt made some clipboard wielding clerk happy. Now our wheelie bins all sit in neat row alongside our neighbours bins and up till this point we have had a civilised communal approach to them. Unfortunately now these new bins have interloped, the Council has written to us to say our bin that has the wrong type of waste in. So instead of confronting our neighbours to demand to know who is messing up the arrangements, I decide to ring the council to ask them to remove the unsolicited and unwanted bin. This unsettles the officious little bureaucrat at the other end of the phone but at last we settle that they will remove the extraneous bin and I promise not to complain about having to take any garden waste to the tip and won’t put it in our green wheelie bin. This settled I shall put any further correspondence about the wrong type of waste and bins, together with the recycling booklets, directly into paper recycling facility.
The cellar is currently a landfill of IKEA boxes from doing up our house. And my Other Half generates a continuous stream of bubble wrapped computer widgets to the door. Harassing people to reduce their waste is all very well but could someone also please tell the retailers? I close the door on the cellar, get another cup of coffee, and decide to think about it all another day.
