Lockley: Are all the recycling bins wheelie worth it

Jun 26 2011 by Mike Lockley, Sunday Mercury

REFUSE collectors have boycotted our green bin – for garden waste – this week.

A flyer entitled ‘reasons for non-collection’ has been attached to the handle. The men in fluorescent jackets have ticked ‘too heavy’ and ‘contains soil’.

“It’s probably too heavy because it contains soil,” explained a council official when I rang to complain.

I pointed out my next door neighbour flung a dead rabbit in his and the binmen didn’t bat an eyelid. “Bit of a red herring, that one,” laughed the jobsworth. “Rabbits are neither heavy nor contain soil.”

“How heavy is ‘too heavy’?” I asked.

“We adopt a common sense approach,” he recited. “If a refuse collector feels he is in danger of injury from lifting an over-loaded receptacle, he is within his rights to decline that particular task on health and safety grounds.”

“There’s four of them,” I bellowed. “I can understand the weedy teenager with a Benny hat having trouble, but one of the blokes is a body-builder, for heaven’s sake.”

“There is a vast difference,” sneered the official, “between lugging a wheelie bin and…”

“…stripping to your underpants, rubbing yourself with baby oil and making your man-boobs go up and down in unison?” I interrupted.

After a silence, the shaken civil servant added: “I was going to say, ‘using free weights in a gymnasium’.”

“May I request a bigger...”

“Bin?” interrupted the council bod.

“No, binman.”

What constitutes, in the eyes of our local authority, green bin-friendly ‘garden waste’ is still a conundrum. “Garden waste is not waste from the garden, per se,” explained the spokesman.

“It’s Mike,” I corrected.

I know this. That’s why they refused to recycle a plaster gnome, which I felt was a lost opportunity. He only needed his fishing rod gluing back on. Our cash-strapped council could’ve got a few bob for him at a car boot sale.

I also know, to my cost, windfall apples, dog excrement, logs, branches, a broken Action Man, split bag of compost, putrefied mole and, now, soil are not garden waste. A handful of earthworms, which do contain soil, were not vetoed ‘per se’, but removed and placed in the black bin for food waste.

Good Reasons To Recycle Paper | The.Mind.Forum

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The recycling effort has been in full swing for some time now, but it is currently experiencing an all-time high in popularity. Cities and counties operate recycling drives, and some municipalities offer rebates on refuse collection fees to citizens who recycle. One of the benefits of recycling is the lessened strain on landfills and less pollution. Another is that new products are manufactured from recycled materials. Paper is especially useful, and there several ways recycled paper can be put to use.

Most often, recycled paper becomes paper products that are of a nature quite like that of the first form. For instance, high grade stock printer paper, quality résumé paper and other paper intended for office use is usually used to create more of that type of paper. Several recycles are possible because the fibers in this kind of paper are strong, but consecutive forms obtain a darker hue than the previous form. Brightness may be retained with bleaching, but that is a costlier process. That is why these papers are ideally turned into colored printing sheets. These papers are of a like grade and the colored dye covers up the darker tone.

Because paper fibers begin to break down in each ensuing use, many times paper is recycled into a lesser grade of paper. Newsprint is of a low enough grade, however, that it will not hurt to make more newsprint out of it. The resulting paper is not expected to be heavyweight material, so recycled newspapers often become more of the same. Other lower grade paper products that are recycled become tissues, napkins, and coffee filters.

Packaging objects are often produced from lower grades of paper, and like newsprint often become the same thing after recycling. Cardboard is a good example of low grade paper that is used to make more of a like grade. Boxes are meant to hold things and to be held as well, so outward appearance is usually not a factor. That eliminates concern over dark shades and production flaws. Cereal boxes are examples of cardboard boxes that actually deal with aesthetics, but the printing that is plastered all over the box renders shades and flaws unimportant in this case also.

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