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.

Yellow bins, green bins and more.

Rubbish collection in Spain is pretty standardised. There are big rubbish bins, of various types, scattered at strategic points in cities, towns, villages and the countryside. The bins are emptied to some organised schedule - usually every night in the cities and towns - less frequently in country areas. Householders take their rubbish to the bin. Pinoso town is a little unusual in that it has a door to door collection most nights. There are big recycling bins all over the place too - the ones in the photo are our nearest in Culebrón village centre - and there are Ecoparques where you can take those hard to get rid of things like engine oil. For bigger things, old sofas and the like, you phone either the town hall, or the company that collects the rubbish on behalf of the municipality, and they, usually, cart it away for free.

I'd half wondered about the subject of this blog, with it's not very Spanish content, when I changed the printer ink the other day. I took the old cartridges with me to town for recycling at the mobile ecoparque which parks up by the Spar shop, in the middle of town, most Wednesdays. There was a class of school children there squabbling over free, "ecologically friendly" bags that were being handed out as recompense for listening to some sort of recycling presentation. Consumption as a way of reducing consumption always strikes me as being like going to the January Sales to save money by buying something you'd not thought of buying till it was cheaper. Hey ho, maybe I'm just a bit curmudgeonly.

Then I got another prod. I was listening to the radio. The piece was on the exhibition about Neanderthals, called Ancestors, at the Archaeological Museum in Murcia, an exhibition we made the mistake of not going to when we were there the other day. Apparently Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct humanoid type species.

So now I'm wondering if I can blog something that links humanoid extinctions to recycling.  Does it surprise you that sometimes people don't follow my conversational twists and turns - especially when I try it in Spanish?!

So we have three capazos just outside our house.  Capazos, are those big, bendy, rubber buckets. We use them as the staging post for things on their way to the recycling bins. Of the three one is for cartons, tins, wrappings and aerosols; that's to go to the yellow bin. The glass goes in the green bins and paper and card goes into the blue bin. We don't have the brown, organic waste, bins in Pinoso area.

Household recycling isn't big in Spain. I think that about one third of urban waste is recycled which is very low by European standards. We try to be good and recycle as we're asked but, to be honest, I think it's all a bit of a con. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for sensible recycling, and re-using, but I do think that if the manufacturers were less interested in reducing transport costs or how their products will display at the point of sale then a good percentage of the recycling would be completely unnecessary. When this comes up in conversation people usually remember taking pop bottles back for the deposit or the doorstep milk deliveries. I don't actually know how these things pan out if you take everything into account. Is it really better, when you consider manufacturing, transport, energy, materials and everything else, to deliver milk door to door or for us to go and get it from a shop in a vaguely recyclable container? It's not the sort of information that I have to hand. I'm sure you've had a similar conversation in the bar about whether electric cars and their toxic batteries are a good idea.

The reason I think recycling (and electric cars and lots more) may well be a smokescreen is that we live in a world where the overriding concern is making money. Nearly everything that goes on in the world is about rich people getting richer. I mean how did someone persuade us that all of these tiny efforts are about "Saving the Planet?". I'm pretty sure that, in the end, the planet will be fine. I don't think we - humankind that is -  will. In fact I'm sure our selfishness and greed will continue to cause the death of lots and lots of species and make even more of a mess of the planet. In relation to the life of the planet though our effect will be very short term. When we've taken out billions more animals and birds and insects in every conceivable way, from destroying the places they live and the food they eat through to strangling them with the plastic rings from six packs, then we'll do something similar to ourselves.  It may be that we will finally unleash our nuclear arsenal or we may just die coughing in a toxic atmosphere or buried under mounds of plastic. Nonetheless, do as we will, the planet will shrug us off and go on for quite a while yet. It will be different world, just as the world that the trilobites or ammonites or even the first jellyfish and sharks knew was a bit different. No dinosaur ever saw a car, a rubbish dump or an energy saving light bulb. The graptolites didn't need an environmental strategy and they never got together, in an as yet unbuilt and unnamed Paris or Kyoto, to lie to each other about what they weren't going to do. That's because graptolites didn't really do a lot of damage. People do a lot of damage but, until there is some sort of astronomical event that does for the Earth, swallowed by the ever expanding local star or something, the world will keep on turning and some sort of lifeforms will wander the land and oceans. 

So, back from the gigantic to the insignificant. Pinoso Town Hall, like so many others has started a composting scheme. The principal reason the Town Hall got in on the scheme is because it will help reduce their bill with the waste processing plant in Villena. It's easy enough to give the scheme a bit of an environmental spin though and, being quite gullible, I was quick to get involved. In return for going to a two hour talk they gave me a composting kit which had lots of gadgets but where the key parts were a bin for the kitchen, to throw the kitchen waste in, and a big composting bin for the garden. The melon rind and tea bags and all the gubbins from the kitchen get mixed in with the garden cuttings in the composter. The stuff doesn't have to be transported anywhere and Maggie already has plans for the compost to be used on a vegetable patch.

It's too late for the Golden Toad or the Passenger Pigeon and it's a bit unlikely that the composter will save the Javan Rhinoceros or the Red Tuna but I suppose it's not doing any harm either.