Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!

In our neck of the woods Tuesday is rubbish-collection day. Each household is allowed to put out two big black plastic bags of household refuse, and orange plastic bags of paper and cardboard. There are also blue plastic bags for garden rubbish.

The black bags and the orange bags are provided free of charge by the city council, though of course we indirectly pay for them in our local taxes. The blue bags aren’t provided: they have to be bought, which pays for the extra collection service.

Under a kilometre away from our home is a recycling depot, where glass, metal tins, aluminium cans, and plastic can be handed in for recycling. There’s no on-the-spot payment for this service, either.

It’s a really good system, and doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how it works.

A couple of Saturdays ago, I saw our Rottweiler’s rear end poking out of the chain-link fence. She was busy squeezing her way through a hole she had made. She’s an obedient dog, and reversed out of the hole when I called her.

Closer inspection revealed the attraction. Some bright spark had put two bags of household rubbish on our neat grass verge. It was in blue plastic bags meant for garden refuse. Duh!?! Wrong bags; wrong day!

Of course, it didn’t take long for some of the local dogs to find the bags and rip them apart, scattering the rubbish all over the place in their frenzied search for food remnants. Just like the last time it happened, bits of paper and plastic were blown by the wind onto our wire fence, creating a collage all-too-familiar in many parts of this country. And the aromas wafting in Roza’s direction had prompted her to attempt an escape, so she could rake through the rubbish herself, before I had a chance to clear up the mess.

Out I went again, armed with black bags and orange bags… wearing yellow Marigold gloves. A real sight for sore eyes! It’s amazing what you can deduce about people from having a sift through their rubbish! An empty ‘Pulmicort’ container, so someone has athsma. Unopened tins of dog food past their sell-by date, and empty dog-food packets, so there’s a dog in the house. A box from dry cat food points to a cat, too. A couple of small nappies from a baby. An amazing assortment of wrappers and boxes from most of the local fast-food joints suggests, perhaps, a working mother pressed for time to make proper food. Four rolls of biscuits, unfinished. A packet of sandwiches, half eaten, and a whole pot of double cream, unopened, suggests further waste of hard-earned cash. Empty wine and beer bottles; tin cans; aluminium drink cans; plastic pots; an assortment of plastic bottles from household cleaners; newspapers; cardboard boxes, … all could be recycled.

Aha! Two envelopes! Unfortunately, window envelopes, so there’s no name or address. But wait! What are these?… Two slips of paper from a local security company detailing the date and time of visits. And the address. Gotcha!

I took the newly-sorted rubbish home. Much to Roza’s chagrin, who had closely observed my activities, I put it in the garage out of her reach to wait for the next Tuesday collection day. Last time I put the bags next to our dustbins, and Roza waited until we’d gone to bed before going on a night-time raid. That week I had the pleasure of clearing up twice.

Sunday afternoon, I got an unopened pack of black plastic bags from the garage, and went off for a chat with the neighbours. Pleasant people. Apologised. Appreciated the gift of ‘free’ black bags. Thankfully, I haven’t had to clear up any more of their mess. And Roza hasn’t been tunnelling, contenting herself with our daily morning walk.

You can take a look in our black bag, if you want. There’s no paper, metal, glass, or plastic. No vegetable matter either: we compost that.

Notice I wrote bag, not bags. In our home, we only use GNLD household cleaners. They not only work very well, they’re biodegradeable, non-caustic, and non-flammable. And they are concentrated. Very concentrated.

For example, just one litre of GNLD disinfectant, called ‘Care’ in South Africa, can be diluted 50:1 with tap water for normal home use. Pay for a litre and get a whopping 51 litres of disinfectant out of it. We like that!

A 1litre bottle of Super 10 makes 11 litres of multi-purpose cleaning fluid. Use it everywhere in the home and garage: walls, floors, tiles, baths, showers, w.c.bowls, stain removal from carpets and clothes, barbecue grills, car wheels, chrome, cleaning the motorbike chain, oil-drip removal from concrete driveways, washing down before painting, to name just a few of the myriad of uses.

Don’t know what we’d do without LDC, either. Among many uses, it performs a very important job in our house… removing chemicals from fruit and vegetables, our main source of carbohydrates. Our largest bill is the greengrocer’s bill, and without LDC we’d be eating tons of hormone-changing compounds on the skins, leaves, and peel of everything we buy there.

So do we practise what we preach? Reduce, reuse, recycle? We recycle GNLD’s biodegradeable plastic bottles. But not very often! Don’t have to… a biodegradeable plastic bottle from Care about once a year; a biodegradeable bottle from Super 10 about once every 4 months, and a biodegradeable bottle from LDC about once every 3 months. Using GNLD’s Homecare concentrates is why we have under half a plastic bag of rubbish a week, using very little space in the local landfill site. So that’s ‘recycle’ and ‘reduce’ taken care of.

The three GNLD spray/mixing bottles we bought 9 years ago are still in daily use… that’s ‘reuse’ for sure!

How about you? What’s going out of your house in your rubbish bags? What sort of impact are you making on the environment?