What a lot of rubbish

Suddenly it's spring. This time last week, there was snow on the ground. Today as I write it's sunny, +16C. At this time year, a middle-aged man's thoughts turn to cleaning the garage, so with Eddie, we sorted out the rubbish that has been accumulating over the snowy months. We segregate waste into paper, cardboard, tins (steel and aluminium), plastic and glass. There's money to be had for the first four categories. Filling the back of the Yaris, we set off for the Punkt Skupu Surówców Wtórnych (recycling point) on ul. Cynamonowa, where the rubbish shown below earned us 14.61zł. Not bad, given that I'd have had to have paid 36zł to have it taken away, so I'm 40zł up on the deal.

But things are changing, and surprisingly for Poland, not for the better.

A new law has been passed, ill-considered and poorly drafted, the result of which means that instead of households making their own arrangements with private companies, they will be forced to pay 89zł to the local authority to take their rubbish away.

For us, this is an extra monthly outgoing of 53zł. Our rubbish is collected by a Piaseczno-based company, Eko-Standard, every other week. They collect everything that can't be recycled or composted. Typically this is mixed waste, contaminated with uncompostable food scraps, Tetrapak cartons (a laminate of card, aluminium and plastic), and in total is about one quarter of our refuse.

The authorities explain the new law as being a) the product of EU Directives aimed at limiting landfill as a form of waste disposal and b) stopping Pan Heniek and Pan Ziutek dumping their household waste in the forests. The new law does neither, it flies in the face of common sense and needs radical re-drafting before coming into force on 1 July.

Listen here to the debate last night in the Ursynów town hall (in Polish). The authorities have tried hard to spin the new law in positive light, but the people of Ursynów are having none of it.

The changes in the law are unfair to those householders who've been playing by the rules and unfair to private-sector companies that have invested in facilities for waste segregation. Fight to preserve the status quo brothers and sisters!

This time last year:
Painting the Forum Orange

This time four years ago:
That's what I like about the North

Cycling and recycling

Time for the year's first Dad'n'Lad cycle. Not far - I'm still suffering from saddle-soreness from yesterday's short ride. This happens every winter as the rump muscles soften from disuse. A few breaking-in journeys are required to restore toughness to the saddle area.

Eddie delighted me by volunteering to go (usually he needs to be coaxed or dragged); the +16C warmth and the feeling that spring is just around the corner prompted him to ask whether he could accompany me.

We had intended to go and see how the motorway building was going on at Węzeł Lotnisko, but impassably muddy tracks and ul. Karnawał's complete closure dashed our plans. So we pressed on northwards to the DHL logistics centre on ul. Osmańska (which I'd never been to before). Seeing the size of the place and the number of trucks and trailers standing there made me realise the importance of air freight as part of the global logistics mix.

And back home for lunch, having cycled a grand total of 14km (not even as far as home to office). In two weeks time the clocks go forward and I'll get back into my (almost) daily cycling routine. I just hope for dry weather so that all the non-asphalted roads around Jeziorki, in particular ul. Poloneza and ul. Oberka, will dry out.

Mobilised by the knowledge that the recycling place in Ursynów is paying 30 grosze a kilo for old newspapers and cardboard, after lunch (cod, potatoes, asparagus, spinach, brocolli, salad, fruit salad), I started sorting the waste. More than I thought. I reckoned yesterday 10kg of old paper and cardboard - but it looks like there at least ten times that! There was 40kg of old newspapers and magazines alone, and there's another 13 bags of unsorted cardboard. Another bag of aluminium cans is also worth a fair bit. So - what a discovery! Rather than paying someone to take my rubbish away, I actually end up getting paid for it - as long as I sort it. Now, all that's needed is someone to pay for the glass and the plastic, and I'm in business!

This time last year:
Winter still holding out in the forest

This time two years ago:
Little car, huge price

This time three years ago:
Old school Łódź

The ongoing problem of household waste

Earlier this year, the nearest waste recycling point to our house, at Nowy Podolszyn, was closed down. Usual reasons. The locals were complaining about the misuse of the facilities, with many brudasi dumping all their unsegregated rubbish (including rotting food waste) there - and the price of recycled materials so low that it's no longer worth the waste management firm's while driving out to leave the bins and bring them back when full.

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.

The waste piles up

Because of the heavy snows, it's been over two months since my last trip to the recycling point*.

And the waste has piled up. Segregated plastics, glass (clear and coloured) and paper/cardboard. Today was a lovely blue-sky day, entirely unpredicted by the weather forecasters, so a good opportunity to load up and head off to the tip (below).

And what a mess met our eyes. The recycling point, operated by Remondis, is in Nowy Podolszyn, at the bus loop. Snow and ice have been moved aside so that the buses could get round, but it was all piled up where the recycling containers sit. So they were just placed on top of heaps consisting of icy grit (or gritty ice). The locals who'd taken the trouble to bring their litter here rather than just dump it in the forest had a hard time to get to the containers. Result - vast amounts of rubbish just left willy-nilly on the ground.

* For the record: we disposed of 252 glass bottles and jars. Nine weeks' worth!

Recycling time rolls round again

It's been over two months since I last visited the recycling bins in Nowy Podolszyn, but then we've been away a lot. Still, time to time to clear out the garage and to address one's conscience to issues of Consumerism. Heaps and heaps of plastic in different colours, glass bottles (158 of them!), paper and cardboard - all needing to be sorted. And time to see just what exactly a Polish suburban middle class family spends its money on and how much waste it creates.

In terms of plastics, mineral water bottles (1.5l) create most waste, along with yogurt cartons. Brands - Cisowianka is our preferred water, Zott's Yogobella, Smakija desserts, Grycan ice cream and Piątnica cottage cheese top the plastics, while in terms of glass Marwit's Owocudo smoothie bottles predominate along with Tarczyn orange juice and Pilsner Urquell empties.

All clean and sorted, we take them and place them in the right bins. We are doing Our Bit (we hope). But there are still reasons to express doubts about all this recycling stuff. I mean our parents never did any of this when we were small... But then things weren't as over-packaged as they are today.

Take a look at the Auchan hypermarket plastic bag (bottom right). You will not see its likes again. A few months ago, Auchan replaced branded bags with anonymous white ones, so that the retailer could avoid having ecological fingers pointed at it as a Polluter of the Landscape. A few weeks ago, the anonymous white bags were again replaced, this time by green, biodegradable ones, which (it says on them) will degrade totally in 24 months when in contact with the air.

Now, I'm a bit cynical here. The old ones, if recycled properly, could be turned into flowerpots or fleecy tops. Will the new "green ones"? I wouldn't want flowerpots or fleecy tops made of a material that will biodegrade in the atmosphere. Plus, the implication is, that if buried in landfill sites, they'll not biodegrade anyway as air doesn't get to them. So really, all the hypermarket is doing is avoiding the PR shame of having its branded bags hanging off trees and in bushes (in the UK these are known as "witches' knickers").

Green consumerism is in its infancy. We're getting fooled left right and centre and don't know it.

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.

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.