Pink horsechestnuts were not the only surprise I got when I went down with the washed & squashed the other day: the recycling bin was full, & there were bags of plastic bottles piled up all around.
I had noticed that the bin was pretty full one day the previous week when I was just passing by, but I put it down to the normal emptying having been missed because of the Bank Holiday, I did not expect it still to be unemptied at midday on the following Monday.
Fortunately I managed to squash in my small collection of bottles into the crowded bin & did not have to face the moral dilemma of what to do. Well, it is not a dilemma at all really, there is no way I am going to walk all the way back home to store them till next week, & I am not going to carry them into town to see if they have any bins there; I would just have done like everybody else & left them on the ground.
I have heard of a local authority which was experimenting with some chips in its public recycling bins which would send a message when one was getting full so that the council could ensure that it was emptied in good time. It would be good if such chips could also be used to allow the public to check before they make the journey, to ensure that there was space – much as we are now promised, by notices on the station platform, that we can ring a number to get a text which will tell us exactly what has happened to the train we are standing there waiting for. (Fortunately I have as yet had no reason to test out whether this service does actually work in real time).
This Monday I got another surprise. I felt confident that the bins would have been emptied, if for no other reason that the doctors’ surgery over the road would have been making a fuss about health risks.
The usual methods of emptying these bins seems to be either similar to what happens with builders skips – a vehicle arrives carrying an empty one which is swapped for the full one, or the full bin is hoistd up & its contents dropped into the body of a much larger truck via a kind of trap door arrangement in the floor of the bin.
Plastic bottle collection is much more sophisticated. The collection lorry is equipped with a giant vacuum hose, about 1 foot in diameter which sucks all the bottles out via a kind of trap door on the front of the bin low down to the floor. Sadly the operator was just finishing up, coiling the hose back onto his vehicle as I arrived, so I missed the childish excitement of watching the bottles whirl round & round through the transparent plastic hose. All the fun of the fair!
All this effort & ingenuity, just to get rid of our waste.
