Life goes on… and as it does, piles of waste and rubbish are generated. As is the way of the world, the local council responded by reducing the size of the waste bin for general rubbish from 240 litres to 140 litres… I assume this was intended to make us all recycle more of our waste.
Of course for the last few months we’ve had twice the number of people here as usual *and* it was over a Xmas period so the amount of refuse more than doubled just as the amount collected was reduced.
The upshot was our bins filling to overflowing within a few hours of being emptied and us having to pile remaining bags of refuse at the side of the garage. There they stayed hiding away sunning themselves until ‘bin day’ when we could be seen scurrying up and down the street in the wee small hours of the morning to dump our waste into the neighbours bins before they are up and watching. Well would *you* like to (repeatedly) ask your neighbours for space in their bins and have them look at you as if you are some sort of profligate monster single handedly responsible for the decline in the worlds resources? No? I thought not! Well neither do we! 🙂
To a large extent this has worked for the general waste, but not for the recyclables which have built up alarmingly over the weeks.
Today I managed to sort *some* of that problem out by the simple, if messy. expedient of persuading the eldest daughter to climb into the bins and jumping up and down whilst I added more of the accumulated crap thus compressing it enough to increase the amount it would hold.
So successful was this… for me at least… that I might well get her to do it again in two weeks time when the recycling bin is due to be emptied next. I’m not sure *she* was too pleased to be in there… and I doubt she’ll be enthusiastic about having to do it again next week, but I’ll tell her this is just a result of living in a throwaway society.
Of course I *could* just pay a little extra on the rates and ask that we be given the old size bin again… but that wouldn’t be as easy as having the daughter doing some exercise. No doubt she’ll understand. 🙂
The Eclectic Interweb 