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.

To the Vistula, by bike

Eddie, Moni and I set off by bike to the Vistula. It's just under 15km/ten miles from home, through the Las Kabacki forest. Across the Warsaw-to-Konstancin highway, we reach an interesting hinterland where development is sparse and farmland still prevails. If there's development I would like to see more of, it's sewage treatment plants. Right now, raw sewage is still pumped directly into the river that flows through Poland's capital; no wonder Warsaw has its back turned to the Vistula. Unlike other major European cities, where the riverbanks are lined with cafes, shops, promenades etc., the banks of the Vistula are unkempt and wild. The water is filthy with floating plop-plops.

Above: Bielawa, where the Okęcie-Siekierki coal line rumbles over flat fields on the last leg to the power station.

Right: The railway bridge adjacent to the level crossing. Graffiti on the bridge, now fading, reads: 'Okrzeszyn City, każdy obcy będzie bity' (Okrzeszyn City, every stranger will be beaten).
Symptomatic of backward, introspective attitudes that prevailed across rural Poland, let's hope they are fading, just like the paint that expressed the sentiment.

Above: the floodbank protecting the Vistula's low-lying hinterlands. A good off-road cycle track with views for much of the way out of Warsaw. I wonder how far south it continues? Below: Taken a few days earlier, late evening near Okrzeszyn, a mile away. The dusty road puts me in mind of 1930s America, yet again. Street lighting betrays the presence of suburbia. It's not rained in over two and half weeks.

More development

Taking off from Okecie yesterday morning, I snapped this brand new development of 131 houses, which will be joined by a further 470. The entire 60 hectare site, when developed, will deliver around several hundred cars a day onto the Aleja Krakowska, heading towards Janki 7km away (monstrous jams already!) and into town.

Below: How the site looks today on Google Earth. I wonder how long it will take before the Walendia development appears here.

It appears that the houses here will start at 1.5m zlotys - that's around 350,000 quid. Given that we're 21km (13 miles) from the centre of Warsaw, we're almost talking London money. If you can read Polish, this discussion on Gazeta.pl's real estate forum on the subject of the Walendia estate is very educational.

It's worrying that developments like Walendia are springing up all over outlying municipalities, beyond Warsaw's administrative borders, with no central planning body in place to oversee the growth of the agglomeration.

The current government has plans to create a number of agglomerations to supervise the outward development of Poland's larger cities - this is a move in the right direction. A body administering Warsaw's growth needs to start with good data and forget the oft-used figure of "1.8 million" for the city's population. It's 2.7 million (900,000 residents are not registered or zameldowani). It's a similar story for all the gminy (municipalities) and powiaty (districts) on Warsaw's periphery. The planned Obszar Metropolitalny Warszawy will take in 17 districts/60 municipalities beyond Warsaw's border. This does make sense, but Poland's propensity to grow its administrative sector beyond what's reasonable is a worry.

This time last year:
Poppies in bloom

One immediately knows one's over Poland

Left: An aerial view of Mazowsze taken last week, less than ten minutes after take off from Warsaw Okęcie airport. Click to enlarge, then note:

How flat the landscape is
How narrow the fields are
How villages are strung out along roads, lacking focal points (village green, church, pub etc.)
This is what makes Poland the country it is. Ideal for mobile warfare, from the Mongol hordes to Hitler's panzers. Lack of primogeniture ensured that feudal landowners subdivided their holdings ad infinitum among all their sons, their sons to all their sons, and so on, until we end up with this patchwork of ribbons. Note also that Stalin failed to collectivise Poland's peasant smallholders and merge their lands into rationally-shaped state farms.

Gaze long and hard upon this photo and see in it the very essence of Polishness. This landscape is near Żelazowa Wola, birthplace of Fryderyk Chopin, his childhood inspiration.

I've done some aerial photointerpretation here, locating the photo and added place-names. We're a few kilometers to the east of Łowicz, a better-known centre of Polish folk tradition. Very much Mazovian heartlands (even though today in Łódzkie province).

This time last year:
Goodness! It was raining!
Ul. Nawłocka at night, night buses

I no longer recognise the land where I was born

Back in Warsaw after four days in London, the city of my birth, the city where I spent 36 years before moving to Poland. In Poland now for nearly 11 years, I find visiting London a sadly disorientating experience; returning to Poland gets me in an upbeat mood. I shall attempt to work out why.

The London of my childhood was suburban, courteous, with a high degree of social trust. Ten miles to the east, the Capital of Empire, war-damaged but still exuding a strength and grandeur in its soot-blackened stonework and proud emporia.

There's a nagging perception that many English people nostalgic for their childhood believe that underlying the decline they've lived through are migration and race. I disagree; below is my class photo at Oaklands Primary School from 1968. In this class there are ten children who are either immigrants or children of immigrants, hailing directly or indirectly from Jamaica, East Africa, India, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Lithuania and Poland (myself). That's one a third of my class – and this is 40 years ago.

It's about nostalgia for what one's missing. Childhood in suburban 1960s London was full of certainties long gone in Britain. A job for life, common courtesy, common sense, a high degree of social trust. Returning to London these days, I mourn for what I miss from those days. Many Brits sense that same sense of loss. And this is what makes for a contrast with living in Poland. No one here feels any loss for Poland's totalitarian past. That all-pervasive shabbiness, fear, shortages of basic goods; institutions that fostered social trust torn down and replaced by the Party, people forced to betray neighbours, friends and family.

(Urban) Britain has less optimism for its future than (urban) Poland. Teenage knifings, drugs, endemic obesity, CCTV, political correctness, causes and symptoms of a once-great nation's decline.

Twilight in the garden

One of life's great pleasures; returning home on a warm spring evening to take in the pleasures of the garden at twilight time. The cares and woes of the day are put to one side, moments are spent in quiet contemplation of the sun's dying rays illuminating the trees as shadows lengthen.

Voltaire said "Il faut cultiver notre jardin"; I'm entirely happy to let someone else do the cultivating for me. The results are somewhat closer to my concept of the sublime than just worrying about where to put a shrubbery.

This time last year:
Marian shrines in our neighbourhood
Garden sprinklers in the spring heat
Late May reflections

Spring walk, twilight time

After the best part of a week of gloom, dense low cloud, on Sunday afternoon the weather brightened up. An evening walk was in order. I ponder why I'm here with my camera; to witness and to record. These fields and wetlands will within the next decade be wall-to-wall housing; before then, I want to show Jeziorki as it was back in the early 21st century. Above: wheat.

Above: Potatoes. A typically Mazovian field, narrow and long. My walk took me to the end of the road, up ul. Kórnicka to the railway line, in time to catch the 19:03 W-wa Wschodnia to Kielce (Corpus Christi holidays only) service as it trundled southwards. Below: looking down the line from the pedestrian level crossing at ul. Kórnicka towards W-wa Jeziorki.

I doubled back along ul. Kórnicka and on to ul. Dumki, to take in the wetlands that lay between this road and ul. Trombity. Here, as the shadows lengthened, I caught this bird of prey (below) swooping down over the reedbeds. (It's a long way off, but can anyone tell what it is?)

Following ul. Dumki home, I had a feeling of deja vu - childhood holidays in northern France in the late 1960s, the chemins vicinals between Stella-Plage, Trepied and Cucq. Same atmosphere in the air, same scents and sights. The bad news is the mosquitos are out in force big time, especially over the reedbeds. The good news is that the padlocked gate closing off the public footpath between ul. Dumki and ul. Sarabandy has been re-opened.

This time last year:
Darkness and light in the city's centre

Zamienie and the rising tide of Development

A walk to Zamienie yesterday revealed the pace of development on Warsaw's southern fringe. Above: One new estate arises in the distance, west of the old vaccine plant, another (Polne Maki) in the foreground, between Zamienie and Dawidy Bankowe. Whoever buys that house with the white cladding in place needs to bear in mind that within five years these fields will be solid with new development.

What of the old Zamienie? Above: Barracks built for employees of the vaccine plant have been vacated in recent months. Ul. Zakładowa will be torn down and doubtless new houses will arise here. We took the opportunity of the fact that yesterday was Corpus Christi, a public holiday, and that there would not be security guards on the site of the former vaccine works, and walked in.

Above: The old boiler house ( 52° 6'47.04"N, 20°58'22.18"E). Wonderful atmosphere.

Above: The old fire station. Securely padlocked, windows boarded over. I'd like to think that inside stands a trio of perfectly preserved STAR 25 fire engines.

Above: General view of Zamienie. What will happen here? No doubt not a trace of the vaccine plant will remain, hundreds of new houses will spring up, several hundred cars will take their owners to central Warsaw via our overcrowded roads. Until then, it behoves us to visit Zamienie and record it in every detail for posterity.