recycling my anger..again...and again..

ok, so, I need to talk about recycling. NAMELY why are people so THICK at doing it?

I must first state that I am as cynical as the next person when it comes to recycling, I am lower-middle class so of course I do it instinctively, like a robot, I carry my bottles &c. home to ensure that they are recycled, I flinch when I put wads of computer paper in the bin at work as they don't do recycling, I even used to save it all at my last job, out the bin, off the floor and bundle it down to the local recycling bin on my bike. BUT I know really that it doesn't do anything, I know they just secretly send it all to china on giant cargo boats where they set it on fire or put it in some landfill, probably demolishing people's houses on the way... yes i have a pencil that says 'i used to be a plastic cup' but if using ALL our recycling was normal then they wouldn't need to write it on the 2 or 3 expensive things that have utilised it, and we wouldn't find it so unusual and groovy that we part with £1.50 for a pencil.

Living with my parents recycling was a big thing. I got used to it. I ordered extra bins due to the unusual levels of waste we all created, I knew when they went out, I tutted at the poor grasp that many neighbours had of recycling- leaving the lids on bottles (tut!) not even RINSING their jars and tINS?!! (TUTT tutt) I learned the complexity of the fact that PAPER can't go in with garden waste and cardboard BUT SHREDDED paper no longer counts as paper and MUST be placed with the garden waste at all costs. Wrapping paper is a no-go. Yes, the bins were left behind for all manner of reasons but i learned their ways and it ticked along okay.

Here in wakey things are very different. MIX it all up is the word. No separation of glass and plastic, paper and card, it points even further to my landfill theory 'naa don't bother separating it, it's going on landfill anyway'.

ANYWAY this recycling tirade was triggered yesterday when on my way home I saw a green bin with a yellow 'we can't take this' tag on it, as I got nearer I realised that this was because the owner of the (pretty posh) house had put a tree stump with about 3/4 m of tree attached to it in the bin, poking out. It probably weighed about 8 stones. Here where I live, people just get all the stuff that they don't need anymore, i say stuff, i mean crap, and shove it in the recycling bin, a metal lamp is broken? counts as a tin doesn't it? broken china? that's like glass yeah? seriously, loads and loads of house clearing is just shoved into the little green box, it is so arrogant, the assumption that the bin men are there to deal with EVERYTHING you don't want to think about. it makes me cross.

It's like when people give all their old shit useless stuff to charity because they can't be fucked to go down to the tip. Who are these bastards? I would have them branded-they remind me of my familiar old bugbear of people who finish something than put it back in the cupboard, or even worse than that, leave such a teeny tiny amount of milk or rice or whatever that it is rendered USELESS. It's more of a smack in the face than the empty packet-'i know, i'll leave one sheet of loo roll, that little half-snag on the bare cardboard tube, then i don't have to bother replacing it'

I've got your number you people. You takers.

At uni we used to fantasise about getting all the crap that the messy people we lived with left and spreading it all over their room, hiding it peeping out of drawers and stuff, the 6-day old gravy from the living room splashed across their laptop, the pan of experimental cooking that they did two weeks ago superglued to their head in the night. These recycle/charity bastards can have the same treatment.

A tree stump in the bath with a note saying 'sorry you're too much of a cretin to deserve recycling, deal with this yourself cockface.'