Hello again.
When you visit another country for a week or so and stay in a hotel or B and B. you don’t worry about the trash pickup. However, when you stay for 6 months, it becomes an issue. After all, you can’t just throw the stuff in the waste basket and hope for the best, can you? Imagine our surprise when we went out back and saw not one, but five bins of different colors and sizes.
We wanted to be good citizens and neighbors while here so we asked about the trash pickup. There is a woman who manages this property for the owner while guests are here, and we spoke to her. We had noticed some trash bins (notice I said some, not one) behind the house and a confusing calendar of trash in the kitchen.
Well, you would think that trash is trash is trash. But, not so. It seems as if each kind of trash has to go in a bin of a different color.
The first one, the orange one gets glass bottles and glass jars. (And please rinse.)
The brown one gets grass cuttings, leaves, small branches, plants, weeds, hedge trimmings and ALL food waste. (We’ve been slack about this one.)
The purple one gets drink cans, food tins, foil food trays, clean tin foil, aerosols, metal bottle tops, metal jar lids, plastic bottles, plastic containers (types PET1 &HDPE2) (??)
The blue one (my favorite of all the colors) gets newspapers, magazines, phone books, cardboard boxes, cardboard packaging, beverage cartons, envelopes, letters, unwanted mail, scrap paper and shredded paper.
Finally, the green one. Non-recyclable waste only. According to the schedule, people are concerned that they don’t have enough space in the green bin!
It turns out that if they would recycle properly, they would reduce waste by almost 70%. Notice how much wrong waste goes into the green bin.
If we stop putting the wrong things into the green bin, this is what we will save. And we will have space in the green bin even after 3 weeks.
By now you are bored with all this trash talk, so I will end with this one last detail. The different color bins are picked up with different frequency and on different schedules.
Well, I hope you have been entertained by this waltz through trash. And I look forward to seeing you next time.
Bye for now.