2: Routines around rubbish

This is the second in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to find a Spanish angle.

This is a very small job. Wherever you live there will be a local variation on how you dispose of rubbish. In most Spanish towns and cities people take their rubbish down to containers that are placed strategically around the streets. The hope is that people will separate out the stuff that can be recycled so as not to fill up the generalist bins. 

The yellow ones get containers like cans and cartons. the blue ones get paper and card and the green ones get glass. The generalist bins are also green. In some places there are brown bins that get organic waste and around here there are a couple of places that have community compost bins though they have not spread as was once promised.

The stuff that isn't organic, or container or paper or glass, goes into the ordinary bin. Theses bins are, usually, emptied late at night in the cities and towns. Pinoso has chosen a different approach. Rather than have big lorries go around in the wee small hours here there is a small truck that takes the bags that people leave outside their homes every evening. The reasoning behind not using the standard, big, neighbourhood containers is that people abuse them. They dump building rubble, worn out mattresses, old kitchen units etc either in, or more likely, alongside the bins. This causes the town halls all sorts of problems in collecting the rubbish and paying for its disposal.

In our particular case we have three of the large rubber buckets, capazos, just outside the front door where we collect the stuff for recycling. I take the containers, glass and paper type stuff to the nearest communal recycling bins when the journey ties in with another. We also have a compost bin, supplied by the town hall, in the garden. Our kitchen bin gets very little use with most stuff going for recycling or to compost.

Almost all the municipalities have systems for collecting the larger items that are "legitimate" household waste but which won't go in the community bins. Mattresses, the old dining room chairs, the calor gas heater etc. The difficulty is that people are impatient and they often want that settee out of their house now, this instant, and they find some way to dump it next to the bins. Hence the Pinoso approach. It's  difficult to put your old deckchairs in a bag hanging from your door handle. The people who can't be bothered to take their stuff to one of the ecoparques, modern style non landfill tips, drive it out to the communal sized bins that are dotted in the country areas around the town. We have one of those communal bins a few metres from our house. Luckily it's not visible from the road or it would soon be overflowing. Fly tipping in open countryside still happens but it's nowhere near as common as it once was.

If you have stuff that's difficult to dump, or potentially toxic, there are systems. Battery collection points are all over the place, there are lots of clothes recycling and used cooking oil bins and nearly everything else from the redundant hi-fi to garden cuttings can be taken to the ecoparques. For small items like printer cartridges, fluorescent tubes, small electrical items and what not there is also a mobile ecoparque that sets up shop most Wednesdays in the town centre.