I made enquiries as to where we could still take segregated household waste. Eko Standard has a waste segregation facility in Łubna (near Baniocha on the Piaseczno to Góra Kalwaria road), where sorted rubbish is gratefully accepted. To make the 18 mile/30km round trip worthwhile, we collect one car-full of segregated waste. Glass, paper/card, plastic. In total, 18 large (recyclable) supermarket carrier bags, full of yoghurt cartons, water bottles, newspapers, cardboard packaging and glass bottles from juice, beer and wine. A car-full of waste accumulated by our family of four in just five weeks (that's with Moni and Eddie both being away for a week on school trips to Norway and Lithuania respectively).
The alternative - throwing it all into two 120 litre wheelie bins would have cost us 40 złotys and the rubbish would have most probably just gone to landfill. Cost of petrol? My wonderful 17 year-old Nissan Micra is still returning 42.5 mpg (6.6 l/100km) in mainly urban driving; 30km would have used around two litres of petrol costing around nine zlotys. Still, therefore worth doing. And the satisfaction of doing good for the environment.
What happens to all that raw material? I suspect, given the large number of German-registered trucks at the waste segregation plant, it heads west, where the German economy is geared to using materials from recycling. Now that would be a waste; truckloads of Polish segregated rubbish being driven halfway across Europe because Poland's own businesses are unable to make use of the low-cost glass, plastic and paper they can pick up on their own backyard.
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In the respect of segregated household waste, things are getting worse.
Companies around all say it's no longer profitable to pick up rubbish because the brudasy do not sort them properly and they have to hire more and more workers to resegregate the rubbish.
And yes, the next shame for Polish economy - no one wants to lift a finger to produce useful stuff from recycled waste. It's not only about environment and solving the problem of what to do with growing heaps of waste on rubbish dumps, it's about cost-effectiveness, it should be mostly about money.
Lovely photo of the reliable car. Observant readers surely have noticed this is one of few photos where the author of W-wa Jeziorki appears himself ;)
Interestingly the workers at Łubna (with the exception of the manager) were all Russian speakers. Everyone very helpful and friendly.
If any entrepreneur can come up with an idea to make use of limitless and almost free raw materials, there are fortunes to be made!
Is that you in the side-view mirror?
Why don't they hold a contest for all of the college students to come up with their best ideas? A fund could be put aside and given to the top three winners who deliver the best ideas about how to reuse these raw materials--instead of carting them off to Germany and generating more pollution. It would generate excitement, and after all, the young people are the future.
I am surprised at the difficulty. Indeed, I thought there must have been a national legal requirement for Gminas to have these points. Apart from the one on our estate, there is one in our village school (Młochów) - and possibly in other local villages, another in the local town (Nadarzyn) school and biweekly Saturday collections in the town square. When I go shopping, there are points at Tesco in Pruszków and in Janki (when I last looked). I don't go enough to Auchan in Piaseczno to have checked, but I'd have expected one somewhere there. They were equally plentiful in Warsaw when I used to live in Jelonki up to couple of years ago.
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