Today is a beautiful, warm, sunny day in Brisbane. I only have uni from 9am-12pm on Tuesdays, and today I arrived home early, around 11:30am.
That's when we went to take our recycle bin in, and discovered that some thoughtless shit-for-brains had come by after it was emptied and dumped a quarter bins' worth of regular rubbish in there. Gam and I and the Resident Managers are the only two units in the complex that actually have recycle bins (the rest were taken away at the end of last year because a few people kept tossing normal rubbish in there, in spite of clear instructions). There is a large skip bin for rubbish, and we are quite spoiled in that the managers put it out 3 times a week for it to be emptied so none of us have to worry about it. That's what makes me think it probably isn't someone who lives here.
The moron who dumped the rubbish in our recycle bin obviously wanted to spread the love, because they part-filled our manager's bin with their junk as well, instead of just putting it in a single bin. It wasn't even properly bagged- there were loads of beer bottles, paddlepop wrappers, empty Just Juice poppers, tampon wrappers and general smelly gunk. The rubbish that was in bags included sausages, more bottles, a Huggies pull-up nappy and a couple of envelopes that we hoped might have identifying information so we could find out where the person lived. No such luck- one was a reply paid envelope and the other was a window envelope. It was sodden with some unidentified substance and crawling with maggots, though.
It was a filthy job and we had to clean out the bin with bleach afterwards, a job made tougher by the fact that there are no hoses any more because of the water restrictions. We had to bag that mongrel's rubbish for them before putting it in the skip, and all up it took about an hour.
I'm sending some very nasty vibes the way of this particular Kotex tampon-using, Paddle Pop-eating filth-beast who enjoys Strongbow and Fourex. I hope they have a very bad day!
6 comments:
Major props to you guys for cleaning that up.
Getting people to think about goods post-consumption is, I think, one the next major environmental mindshifts that will happen. We just need rubbish to become more expensive.
At least I hope it is, cause we're pretty shit with it.
i agree, taxing producers to force them to take responsibility for packaging will result in the cost being passed to consumers, in the form of a deposit most probably.
i buy a can of coke, included in the price is a packaging deposit, if i bring the can back i get the next can of coke less the price of the packaging deposit, or my money back should i be so inclined. ditto cars, tvs etc.
the govt. will essentially be charging manufacturers for a service that's been paid for by taxpayers, disposing of unwanted products.
It works, too. In Ghana we did not see a single piece of broken glass in the streets the entire time we were there, because of the simple fact that the soft-drink and beer bottles are taken back to the seller for reuse by the manufacturer. You fail to return the bottles and the seller will refuse to sell you more drink!
Mind you, there was a heck of a lot of other rubbish due to the lack of garbage-removal services... but if other forms of packaging were worth something I have no doubt they would be cleaned up pretty fast too.
That's awesome. What a great system.
Sounds a bit soup nazi though.
"Didn't bring back your can ... NO COKE FOR YOU!"
Some people are really rude, I'm very sad that they're address wasn't in there, you could have had great fun with that!
Ahhh, Container Deposit Legislation, the big debate in Australian waste management at the moment.
WA are thinking about putting it in, and how they can basically do it better than SA did 20 odd years ago (oddly enough, this was partly the reason I was in Perth!).
I think it's a good thing too, but industry, as you can imagine, is bitterly opposed to it.
In most of the world it's been a roaring success with the notable exceptions of Hawaii and Switzerland I think (some eurpoean country, maybe it was Germany), where it was a complete disaster.
In Denmark, a carton of cheapish beer is about fifty bucks. But if you bring back a carton of empties you'll get twenty. Now there's an incentive.
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