it's hard to be green

Tendring District Council has gone over to segregated instead of co-mingled recycling.  Their contractors have been delivering extra colour-coded recycling boxes, a chart to let people keep track of what has to go out each week, and an optimistic little booklet.  We got ours a couple of weeks back.  I was initially all in favour, since waste paper seems more likely to arrive at a depot somewhere as a material capable of being made into something else useful (cardboard?  egg boxes?  loo roll?) if it has not previously been chucked in the back of a lorry with people's washed out cat food tins, and the new regime includes food waste collection.  A lot of energy has gone into producing that food, and I liked the idea that the left-overs could be fed into an anaerobic digestor and yield up some of that energy, instead of going to landfill and yielding up methane to add to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

I am a bit disappointed.  I am worried about the paper collection, because our new red box, for paper, did not come with a lid.  Paper has to go in a closed container, because otherwise it will blow all over the garden and down the lane in any sort of a breeze, and I am not spending an hour a fortnight litter picking my own recycling.  Materials have to be placed on our boundary by 7.00am for collection, and in practice the dustmen get here pretty early, so as I'm not going to set the alarm for six on paper Thursdays so that I can rush to put the red bin out, it is going to have to sit out by the boundary all night, giving plenty of time for it to blow around.  I found the lid of the existing green bin, and the red bin is slightly larger, so the lid will not sit snugly on the rim of the box.  In a gale I'm not sure a brick is going to hold it all night.  In the past I've managed by only leaving paper out for recycling on still evenings, and putting it in a bag, but under the new regime they will not accept bags.

More irritatingly, they will no longer accept quite a lot of sorts of recyclable plastic.  Magazine wrappers, shrink wrappers from multi-packs of catfood and soft drinks, punnets that fruit or vegetables came in, margarine and yogurt pots.  All of these have the little recycling triangular symbol on them, but under the new contract the waste company don't want them.  They only want milk and soft drinks bottles (without lids).  I know that milk bottle plastic lids are recyclable because someone was collecting them for charity in one of the local shops.  Tendring seem to have done a deal, and allowed the waste company to cherry pick the most valuable bits of plastic waste, consigning the other recyclable materials to landfill.

They haven't given us an extra green box.  The leaflet says that in future only the council box may be used, and that recyclable material placed in bags will no longer be collected.  I know from driving around on days when people's recycling is out for collection that many households use bags as well as their box, because they generate too much to fit in a single box.  I rang up the number at the council given in the leaflet and asked how I could get another one, given that I had four cats and there was no way that a fortnight's worth of cat food tins plus our tins and plastic bottles would go in one box, and was told I could go on the waiting list for one, as they didn't have any at the moment.  They should really have worked that out in advance, given that if I can see how many people overflowed their green box before then so can somebody from the council, or the waste company.  In the meantime I am allowed to use my red box for tins and bottles, as long as it goes out on the correct day.

That still leaves me with the shrink wraps and all.  I asked at the dump, when I was dropping off some bags of nettle roots and other nasties, but the dump is run by the same firm that has the collection contract for Tendring, albeit the dump is an Essex County facility, and they don't want polythene either.  It's true that we could partly solve this problem by buying less wrapped stuff, but there are only about two flavours of cat food in Tesco that don't come in multi-packs (quicker for them stacking the shelves) and the Systems Administrator is partial to diet coke and diet tonic water, which likewise come in packs of six.  I'm a tea drinker myself, but  if the SA prefers sugar-free soft drinks then denying them on the grounds that the packaging is not fully recyclable in Tendring seems harsh.

The food bin comes in two parts, an outside bin with a lockable lid to stand at the boundary, and a little caddy to go in the kitchen.  Since getting our bins we haven't actually had very much to put in them.  There were some cheese rinds, and some burnt pizza crust, and some Value onions that I bought and the SA was rather slow to cook with, some of which began to go off in the bag, so went into the council bin in case it was any sort of an onion disease I'd rather not have in our compost heap.  Then there was the carcass of a chicken after it had been boiled for stock (having yielded a roast, a pie that did two meals and a retro curry) and had the remaining meat picked off for the cats.  There were two slices of ham that slipped through the net in the fridge, contrary to our self-image that we don't waste much food.  But we don't.  The ham was an aberration.  If we have boiled a bit too much rice or potato the chickens eat it, along with any ends of brown loaves.  I haven't tried them on left-over pasta, because there never is any.  Raw peelings and cores go straight on the compost heap, and the council certainly isn't having them.  The kitchen caddy will be an interesting discipline, obliging us to notice things like the ham, and the end of a packet of butter that was never used for cooking before it became rancid, but I doubt we'll fill more than one caddy a week.  The contents will look rather pathetic, rattling around in the bottom of our enormous sealed top outside waste food bin.

The leaflet from Tendring District Council said, smugly, that our black bin of non-recyclable should by now be tiny, but in fact it will be bigger than before, trading off one chicken carcass and some cheese rinds against all the plastic wrappers and grape and mushroom punnets.  I'm disappointed.