The Recycling Run

We have a newspaper recycling container that gets collected twice a month. The Man of the Place and I are not good at remembering to look at when the next collection will take place so it seems that our newspaper bucket is always full to bursting. For glass, plastic and cans there is no regular collection. We have to take those into town ourselves. We're lucky that we have a lot of space out here. I planted a box hedge near the big oil tank in our back garden. This partially obscures the containers we use to keep things sorted until we can make a trip to a recycling centre. I have a couple of old laundry baskets, and some collapsible storage crates that we use for this. Two containers are used for tin cans and aluminium, two for glass and two for plastics.

We let it pile up this time. You can see that plastic milk jugs started taking over the world and I had to use a garden refuse bag to hold the plastic overspill (more plastic). The trip into town with the stuff for recycling was way overdue. I did it this afternoon after work. It needed to be done and when I got home there was enough daylight left to get everything out and sorted. It's a messy job though we are very good about ensuring that everything is washed before going out and I'm glad the job is behind me now.

One decision we made when creating the recycling area in the back garden was to never make a trip into town merely to haul things in for recycling. A special run into town with all the fuel spent driving in would undermine the good we are trying to do with recycling. I had to go to the supermarket anyway. No really, we were out of milk.

The back seat of the car was so full, there was no room for Polly to come along. She didn't seem to mind. I caught her sleeping in a sunbeam (rare) alongside the cat. When I went to take a photo of the two buddies, Polly sat up blocking the sunbeam for Julio the cat. A minute later, Julio went to go find a better sunbeam. Because I am now not blindly throwing away all plastics, but rinsing them and putting them out for recycling, I am much more aware of how many plastics are used in my life. I hate plastic containers. I have actually tried to go shopping and not use or buy anything contained in plastic and it was impossible.

It was fun looking at all the things that we have put out for recycling. Empty bottles of pinot grigio, sancerre and gin with at least one champagne bottle along with glass jars from spaghetti sauce and glasses that didn't survive that final cycle in the dishwasher. The cans were almost exclusively cat food and dog food. There were some empty pop cans thrown in there for variety.

The recycling containers are empty again. No more picking stuff up that has blown out of the overfull crates. For the next week or so, I'll be very good about keeping things separated when taking them out to be sorted for recycling. Later on when all the containers are full, I'll end up putting stuff in any container that still has a bit of room in it. I'm like that.