It was bin day today so I guess I should warn you folks that today’s blog is rubbish. “Oh yeah,” I hear you say, “What makes that different from any day?”
Well, okay, I can’t actually hear you say that, but if I were beside you when you were reading this and you were one of those people who read things out loud instead of keeping them in your head…I might.
But seriously, folks…rubbish.
Did you ever think it would get so darn complicated?
There was a time when rubbish was, well, just rubbish. If you didn’t need something any more or it was used up, it was, well rubbish. And you put that rubbish in the bin and that was that.
Of course we never really thought about where all that rubbish was going, or the harm it might have been doing, but hey, so long as it was out of our kitchen and not stinking up our back yard, who cared?
But then came all the warnings about how all the landfills were filling up and the damage all this dumping was doing to the environment and the green revolution began.
I don’t mind recycling, I think it’s cool that stuff can be used again instead of just dumped into a big hole in the ground to rot, but it does make the whole rubbish thing more complicated than ever.
For a start there’s the sorting. No more is it just a case of throwing stuff in the bin, you have to decide if it can be recycled first and then choose what bin it has to go into.
And you have to wash out the bottles and cans and old milk cartons, there’s a lot of work in putting out the rubbish these days. That’s if you actually know what day to put the rubbish out that is.
(I’m getting ahead of myself here a bit folks, but work with me I’m on a roll.)
Yep, even putting the rubbish out for the bin man has become a complicated affair now, because with more than one bin for collection and more than one type of label to attach to the right bin on the right day, bin day has now become like a big game show in our household.
It’s like you’ve just reached the final and your grand prize is that all the rubbish, (even that one bag you’ve stuffed in at the top that means the lid won’t close properly any more), will be taken away…but only if you guess right.
Which bin is it today - green or blue and have I the right labels for the right bin?
To make matters more complicated, even though you are praised for being green when you recycle, in my part of the world the recycling stuff goes into the blue bin. Yep we have a green bin but the recycling stuff goes in the blue bin!
All that said it really shouldn’t be as big a guessing game as it has turned out to be, because I’m pretty sure that the collector gave us a calendar at the start of the year indicating which week which bin would be collected.
But, it was just a piece of paper and I’m pretty sure since it was cluttering up my fridge door I put it in the bin – yes…the blue one!
Putting stuff in the bin is one thing, I’m talking that wee kitchen one here now folks. Getting it out to take to the wheely bin though can sometimes be something entirely more difficult.
You see the people who make those black bin bags must have been having a competition for years to see whose bag can be the thinnest and will fall to pieces first when somebody tries to lift it.
Once upon a time black bin bags were sturdy things. They were used for all sorts of useful things like, well, umm, Halloween costumes. And they didn’t fall apart when you touched them with your finger.
Nowadays most of the bags are worse rubbish than the rubbish they are supposed to be holding. You don’t know that when they are rolled up together in the pack, but once you get them home and put one in the bin you know that, if you hadn’t forked out €3 for them, you could throw the rest in with them.
Until you’d realise…hey that would be the wrong bin. They’re plastic they can be recycled.
No comments:
Post a Comment