Tucked away in my warm bedroom, I hear nothing of the world outside except for the occasional possum on the roof. This morning I was already in the kitchen to make myself an early-morning coffee when through the trees and bushes I could first hear the hissing air brakes and then see the blazing headlights of the Council's garbage truck stop-starting down the dark lane.
For years I've been mocking Padma when I see her washing out empty jam jars and even rinsing every bit of plastic before committing it to the recycle bin. Those people at the recycle depot will have been in for a rude shock these past few weeks, because I drop every container into the bin as soon as I've spooned out the last bit of whatever it contained. In fact, sometimes I leave so much in it, it could still feed an army.
The only containers I scrub and clean are those plastic boxes my Chinese take-aways come in. At fourteen dollars a pop, Chinese take-aways are a marginal business, and by taking back those boxes for a refill I can save them a few cents, and in return get a little bit of extra sauce.
Anyway, the carefully constructed promise of recycling is nearly all a lie manufactured by the plastic industry. The dream of recycling was invented by them to distract us from the very real issues of plastic pollution. While many of us are doing our part to save the planet and dutifully putting our plastics in recycling bins, it is nearly all one big charade. Why? Because recycling bins do not take our recyclables to fancy facilities to recycle them. They still go to landfills. Eventually, future generations will end up living on top of one gigantic landfill.
Go to [6:28] in the above video clip to check out the deft rolling technique
When I was a boy in Germany, each house had just one metal garbage bin which had a capacity of - I've checked it with GOOGLE - 110 litres.
The garbage truck had a team of five: the driver; one man who ran ahead and collected the garbage bins from each house entrance and placed them along the kerbside; two men who heaved the heavy bins onto the hydraulic lift at the rear of the truck; and a fifth man who took the empty bins back to the house. All this was done at a constant trott while the truck slowly moved down the street, with the garbage men using an amazingly deft technique to roll the heavy bins back and forth.
They only came once every two weeks, when we would watch them in awe, and say to each other, "Wir wollen bei der Müllabfuhr arbeiten, da brauchen wir nur alle vierzehn Tage einen Tag aufstehen und was tun".
