More rubbish.

No sooner do I blog about the bloody bins than we get another bloody bin: the infamous green bin arrived today. This one's for garden waste, though not soil, and it's the same size as the other two, and they're going to collect it every two weeks.

All the houses in this street have small gardens. I generate enough garden clippings to fill this bin maybe twice a year, and I do a lot more gardening than many people. So isn't coming out to collect this thing in a big diesel truck every fortnight a horrible environment-damaging waste of resources?

While we're on the subject, another thing that pisses me off about the recycling is that all cans are supposed to be cleaned before being put in the bin. As a result, our dishwasher is being used markedly more than it used to be. Now, you might say that we should wash the cans by hand, but you'd be wrong: mechanical dishwashers use water, detergent, and energy more efficiently than human ones, making them the more environmentally-friendly option. The really environmentally-friendly option is for the cans to be thrown out dirty and cleaned by the council, because economies of scale mean that the more things you clean at once, the less resources are used to clean each item. This forced recycling is supposed to be for the benefit of the environment, yet the council's policy of insisting that cans be cleaned before they are collected leads to more water and energy being used than necessary and more detergent being put into the water supply than necessary.

There'll be a brown bin soon, for glass. The two of us will need to drink about forty bottles of wine a week to fill it. And I don't like wine. We don't have room for all these bins. I may actually have to put extra paving down and extend our patio, just so that we can fit the bins into our garden. Seriously. And that's not efficient, either.