recycling

One thing that scares me, is that recycling in this county, in Gwynedd, is just tick boxing at the local government level, to meet Welsh Government targets. Then they reach those targets, but they give us these blue bins which are unfit for purpose, that fall to the ground at the slightest breeze and all our roads and streets and country lanes are just littered with this stuff. And what damage is that doing. What scares me is that it becomes the norm. The younger generation think that’s the norm. When I was a kid, there wasn’t a drop of litter here.

This morning - I feel awful about this - I was putting the rubbish out, and I was taking the recycling out but I’d missed it because they are coming earlier. My neighbour had already put hers out, and they said ‘don’t say anything’ and chucked her recycling in the rubbish. That thing about not taking care, not believing in the systems that have been put in place in order to try and make a change ecologically. The little things we can all do. Like the hydros, just bash it through. People don’t really ask why.

I’m struggling with plastic at the moment. When I drive around all the verges are full of rubbish. I hadn’t noticed it before. There’s so much of it. The refuse, the way things, its so windy here that there’s often recycling blowing around everywhere. The boxes aren’t strong enough. I put bricks on them. I wash everything, check the labels. But does anything get recycled? I don’t feel confident that the systems in place are really working or that people care about them at the next level. We can do a lot as individuals but if we do a lot as individuals but at the next stage – the next level up - nothing happens its pointless really.

I had this conversation with someone from the council who was very keen on recycling, and they said they have a strict littering policy, sort of like a policy, people can’t litter any more. But the worst exponent of littering is the council itself. Because of this stupid thing where they go round and throw these things into that lorry once a week, leave the flaps open. If you drive behind them in any kind of wind, and everything is falling out. Its dreadful.

This lady turned up turned up at my door, one of the managers from Gwynedd recycling, and asked ‘why have you only put that much food in your brown bin?’. I said ‘well that’s the only amount of food that we’ve got, we are quite strict with food, we don’t like to waste’. So I turned round to her and said ‘what are you doing about your own littering, because you are the worst litterers in this county. There are littering laws: If I went behind one of your vans and filmed it, I could take you to court, every single day of the week.’ Oh she said ‘oh no no no, that’s all people throwing things out of their cars, coming home from McDonalds on a Saturday night’. But I told her I agree, but very little is that. I told her ‘we do this litter pick, and I picked up this copy of the Sunday Telegraph. And I opened it out and somebody had done the cryptic crossword’. And I told her ‘with all due respect to people who go to McDonalds on a Saturday night, I don’t see them driving home doing the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword’. She said ‘oh no, you are trying to be clever now’. That’s always what you get from them, when they lose the argument.