Recycling for fun and profit

Since May 2007, as a family we've been conscientiously separating household waste. (See this article from last November.) Our savings in terms of money have been significant - instead of paying 64 zlotys a month to have our rubbish removed (two wheelie bins a week at 8 zlots a pop), we're down to two a month - 16 zlotys. Fruit and vegetable waste goes into the garden composter, while glass, plastic and paper are stored separately and driven to Nowy Podolszyn. The recycling bins here, operated by Remondis, are never full, as they often are in Zgorzala. The bins at Jeziorki, mentioned in the November article, have gone, local residents were furious at the mess left by unscrupulous users who treated the site as a general dumping ground for all waste (rubbish was everywhere).

In the six weeks since my last visit to the bins, we got through 134 glass jars and bottles, two 120 litre binbags full of plastics (yogurt cartons and mineral water bottles to the fore) and a 120 litre binbag full of paper and cardboard.

Recycling in itself is not the answer to man's woes; we need to consume more rationally, not be prey to the marketing of the FMCG corporations, consider what we're doing as we spend and be conscious of how it affects the environment and our wallets.