stevensfo wrote:One thing that I've found suspicious over the last decade is the way in which we're all supposed to sort out our rubbish, but when you ask anyone what 'EXACTLY' happens to that rubbish, nobody can tell you. The council tip people say, "A truck takes it away."
Ha, my neighbour needed to get rid of an old fridge freezer that still had CFCs in it. Ooh, said the council, you can't bring it to the recycling centre. We'll have to send a truck out to collect it.That'll be thirty quid please.
He paid the money. A week later, a council refuse truck turned up and two burly operatives hoisted the fridge freezer into its open maw. Then they switched on the compactor. As they drove away, you could almost hear the hiss of the CFCs escaping.
Nothing surprises me any more, though. According to my council, if I've got dead flowers from my garden, they go into the green waste bins. But if I've got dead flowers from a vase in my kitchen, they go into the grey bin for landfill because they're contaminated. And I could be fined for doing it any other way!
We don't have food bins, so our orders are to put all food waste into the grey bins as well. It's a good job that we hardly ever have any. One of the benefits of being brought up in postwar Britain is that we were taught that it was a sin to waste food. But as for the rest, it'll probably all end up on a beach in West Africa or Indonesia or Bangladesh.
I once asked our county councillor with responsibility for environmental recycling why we weren't allowed to fill our green bins more than halfway? She said she was often asked that question by householders, and her answer was usually that they had too many trees in their gardens and they needed to think about digging some of them up. She didn't last long in that job. But the question was, how the hell did she get appointed in the first place?
BJ