Random thoughts on recycling

It's black bin day here tomorrow. We have 3 bins, blue (recycling) & brown (compostable garden waste) are emptied 1 week, and black (rubbish, burnt for energy). I've always tried to recycle as much as I can - when Elder Son was a little boy at preschool, I'd load up the cans & jars into the shopping trolley, take him to preschool, queue at the Post Office to get my income support money & go to the supermarket. Recyclables into their appropriate bins, go into the supermarket & do the shopping, get home & put it away (or at least frozen & chilled stuff) before going to get him after his 2 1/2 hours at preschool. This was when we only had the black bins, of course. It's much easier now.

But sometimes it's still difficult. We don't use dairy milk, & I've not seen (affordable) non - dairy milk round here. One can make it, but then it wouldn't have the added calcium. So there are always tetra packs to dispose of. The supermarket used to have a bin for them, but then the council said we could put them in the blue bin. So the supermarket got rid of the unused bin... & then the council said we could only recycle them at the dump (I mean 'Household Waste Recycling Centre'). Which is okay if I store up a couple of weeks of tetra packs & put the bag in the car & go off to the dump... Till lockdown when the dumps were closed, & though they're now reopened, there's a booking system.

And it feels a bit of a waste of fuel to book a space just to do the tetra packs!  (I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I could find to take, but it just feels very stressful, having to book a space, making sure everything is small & light enough I can do it on my own, etc.) 

So I'm currently using the empty tetra packs as kitchen bins & putting them in the black bin to be burnt for energy. And that's okay for now. 

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