To Bin Or Not To Bin

In a recent post we mentioned how Wallingford now boasts a recycling station where we can dump our used toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes and various other items. Which is great, but it got me thinking about how much necessary separation of waste still isn’t happening in our general day-to-day existence. In particular, what happens to all the rubbish that goes into bins on the street?

Back in the spring, I took part in the annual Wallingford litter-pick, which made me feel a little bit virtuous, but mostly just depressed. Since then, I’ve had an eye on the rubbish that just lies around, and if I see some on the ground and I’ve got a hand free (i.e. if I’m not carrying a lazy/tired 4-year-old), I will pick it up and put it in the nearest public litter bin. Takes a few seconds, makes me feel better about myself, tidies up the locality… all good. Except is it? Because the vast majority of the public litter bins in Wallingford are, effectively, black bins, where everything gets dumped in together.

There are a couple of divided (perhaps schizophrenic?) bins in Wallingford, just near the market square and the entrance to the park, with different sections for general waste, plastics and paper. But like I say, the majority are black bins, and I was pretty sure that no one was going to be sifting through that stuff to separate it out before it reached its final destination. An email from South Oxfordshire District Council confirmed this – general litter bin contents are incinerated to generate electricity.

If Vicky were writing this article, then at this point you’d get some maths about the carbon footprint of burning rubbish and the amount of electricity it generates, versus the time, effort and energy that would be required to properly separate and recycle it. But I’m not Vicky, I’m Mr Harrison, and Mr Harrison is lazy. So let’s just take it as read that burning rubbish is bad, even if it helps keep the lights on, and in an ideal world all the public litter bins would be divided; after all, if efficiently separating out the waste in public litter bins wasn’t possible, why would they have installed those two divided bins?

In fact, that’s a good question. There are scores of public litter bins in Wallingford, maybe even a hundred. And they’re all different. Some have lids, though most don’t. Some are divided, most aren’t. Why the difference? Well, presumably they’re all different ages. They’ve all been installed at different points over the years, and they will have been chosen and paid for by the district council according to the options in front of them at the given time. The lidless ones annoy me most, because as we all know, England gets lots of wind (insert your own gag here). Would the annual litter pick be needed if the bins had lids on?

I emailed the council that question, and was pleased to be told that they are apparently in the middle of putting lids on all the bins. So that’s great, but of course it’ll take time. There are a lot of bins in South Oxfordshire, after all, and as I say, they’re all different designs. But surely a proper job would be to replace all the bins with divided models, and follow that up with a collection strategy that means that public litter, like household waste, gets collected and treated according to whether it is recyclable or not?

In the meantime, the best approach when you’re out and about seems to be to take your rubbish home with you and bin it in whichever of your household wheelie bins is most appropriate. Essentially, what I guess I’m saying is, please take your rubbish home with you.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?