Friday, December 22, 2006

Recycling

A report has come out recently suggesting that recycling is saving 10-15 million tonnes of CO2 per year, and that we are now recycling nearly a third of rubbish. A couple of years back, there were claims that recyling was 'burning trees to reuse trees' - ie, that it was pointless and we should just make stuff and put it in landfill. I suspect the people making those claims are the same ones moaning about new landfill sites. To be fair, I think their arguement was based on people driving 5 miles once per week with a few newspapers to recycle, which is clearly daft.

Our council are apparently going to replace all our wheelybins with compartmentalised ones - to help lazy people sort their rubbish. One of our neigbours always fills their bin to the brim - there's usually a wadge of paper or something recyclable or compostable preventing the lid from closing - and there's only one person in their houshold. We've got a baby (about the most un-environmental think you can do!) and we only produce a third of the rubbish - mainly just through sorting out paper, glass and cardboard. The new scheme claims to take plastic bottles as well - excellent news as there hasn't been anywhere local that could do that - and I'm not going to drive miles to the nearest plastic recycling plant!

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