The Invasion of the Dusty Bins

A legion of Dusty Bin’s greener cousins has just invaded our road: it appears the local council have decided we too are to join the tortured Proletarier Menschen and start our own state run refuse sorting and recycling mini industries. We now have a total of 10 bins, boxes and sacks of various hues.

And to make matters worse, there’s a complicated timetable of collection schedules ranging from weekly and fortnightly all on different days.

I’m going to need a bigger calendar.

There’s the blue box for bottles, tin cans, no plastics; the blue paper sack for squiff mags and the associated used tissues; a mini green box with lid for food wastes; a grey mini box with lid for, er, food wastes – ah I see, the green one is for leaving outside, the grey one inside. WTF? Sod that, I’ll keep the green one inside and throw away the grey. A clear sack for batteries and spectacles? Spectacles? A black sack for textiles (yeah, like I’ve got a living room full of illegal immigrants weaving away making carpets), a black box for plastics and a green bin and sack for garden waste.

Which begs the question: why don’t they just have two black bins collected once a week where everything goes to a big tanker headed off to China where it can be recycled en masse and cheaper?

Well, I’m just going to put the little refuse I have in the black bin and throw the other stuff away. I’m sick of this nonsense. I put a notice up outside my house last year to stop the free newpapers because I was tired of the piles of rotting newsprint stinking the place out. The small contents of my paper shredder make excellent fire starters from the addressed correspondence that I receive.

Also, another thing I hate about the blue box (tins, glass and aerosols, no plastic) is the delightful little early morning front shower it gives you when you lift it up. You see, in their collective wisdom, someone on the blue box designer team thought that if we put some small holes in the bottom of the blue box, then when it rains, the blue box won’t become full of rainwater and become too heavy to lift. Well, as I always say, that’s fine on paper but in practise? Nope, the blue box is lying on the concrete floor and the holes are flush with the ground and are sealed so the rain water does indeed accumulate in the blue box. Why aren’t the holes recessed? Ah, costs, of course...

So bleary eyed, tired and grumpy in the dark, wintery mornings when you pick the blue box up, the water pours out the holes onto your trousers like you’ve been carrying at arm’s length a quadruplet of incontinent, pissing babies. And heavens forbid if you’ve left the dregs of half a dozen bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in there as the stench and colour of that vinegary wine is added to the foul mixture of the morning wakeup call.

Mind you, you get some sympathy at the workplace because everyone at work thinks you’ve got a severe case of kidney stones.