On Recycling

As the weather's rubbish there's nothing else to write about but rubbish. Of the recycleable sort. Living in London, local government taxes (rates) are crippling. My parents pay the London Borough of Ealing £140 a month - they spend more on rates than on any other outgoing. Here in Jeziorki, we pay the equivalent of £30 a year in local government tax. But then we get hardly any local services (no town drains etc). A private company empties our septic tank and our bins. It charges us 8zł (about one and half quid) to empty a 120-litre wheelie bin of household waste. When we moved into our house, we were disposing of two such wheelie bins a week. Then I bought a composter for the garden, to recycle vegetable kitchen waste. Then I started crushing and storing aluminium cans for recycling. 

In May this year, Moni, inspired by school ecology lessons, persuaded us to start separating glass, plastic and paper. Every fortnight or so I drive to one of the local waste recycling points to dispose of the segregated waste. These have recently sprung up all over the place. There's one in Zgorzala, another in Nowy Podolszyn - most of the nearby villages have recycling points. The benefits are manifold. Less dumping of waste in to nearby forests for one (although this still happens, it now tends to be building waste from construction sites). 

For us, we've cut our monthly spend on rubbish removal from 64zł to 16zł - it now takes around two weeks to fill a single wheelie bin with stuff other than paper, glass, plastic, aluminium and vegetable waste. But the collection of the segregated waste leaves much to be desired. Collections are less frequent than they should be, the lazy and messy just dump their rubbish on the ground by the containers if they're full, often (especially at weekends), they are. I will take the trouble to drive on to the next collection point, but many don't. This leads to complaints from local residents, who have to put up with the mess from week to week. The picture above shows the collection point by the local shop on ul. Karczunkowska on a Sunday afternoon. Last week the plastics bins were overflowing, today plastics was OK, but paper was full. Gloom continues. We were about to go for a walk but it started to rain. Time to think about happier things; I still need cheering up. 

 UPDATE: June 2008 - the collection point on ul. Karczunkowska is shut down owing to local complaints at how people using it just dump unsorted rubbish all over the vicinity. A shame.