Rubbish

Trying to sort your rubbish is a complicated matter, even if you are well intentioned and committed to recycling as much as possible.

If you live in most parts of Melbourne, for example, you would expect to put your wine bottles and glass jars in your recycling bin, along with your hard plastic containers and your paper and cardboard.

But in some places you are supposed to put the plastic lids back onto your flattened plastic juice bottles and to screw the lids back onto your empty wine bottles.  In other places this is a big No No.

In Ballarat the council has recently required that we cease putting our glass into our recycling bins and instead we have to collect them up and take them to bottle banks by the supermarkets.  Absolutely NO LIDS allowed. Not any kind of lid. Not anywhere

If you happen to be holidaying in Ballarat it is unlikely you will know this, thus causing much contamination of the recycling bins.

We arrived in our holiday house in Kyoto and found instructions that Non-burnable rubbish was to go in one bin and Burnable rubbish in another.  This was hugely confusing.  Are we to put paper, which is clearly burnable but also highly recyclable, into the burning rubbish?  And what to do with the soft plastics, chip packets and other stuff?

I sent Austin a message.  His reply was that he didn't really know.  They had different bins where he lives. So I messaged our host who replied that only bottles, cans and tins go in the unburnable bin. Everything else goes in the burnable bin.

We can certainly do that but I have been so well trained over many decades to sort the rubbish much more minutely that makes my environmental conscience (such as it is) quite anxious.

The Ballarat Council has been sending its citizens messages that declare in VERY LARGE LETTERS "if in doubt, leave it out". The worry is that sorting the recycling to the Authority's satisfaction is such a minefield that it is much, much easier just to put everything into the general rubbish.

On another matter, the three of us arrived in Japan with one plastic carrier bag (which we still have) and two or three sandwich bags.  We have been here for two days and we are swimming in a sea of plastic bags - even though we are carrying re-usable shopping bags and refuse plastic bags as much as we can.  I'm not sure that Japan has caught up with the whole Use Less Single Use Plastic message yet