Back in the '70s we tried to get a resistant Bellinger Shire Council to get some recycling happening. It wasn't happening in the great councils that Bellinger councillors admired and aspired for their bailiwick to be like, such as Las Vegas and Singapore, so it was quite a struggle, and of course we were
dismissed as dirty rotten hippies. They knew that landfill and burning at the local garbage tip was the way to go, for plastics, metals, timber, garden waste, paper, dead hippies, you name it.
Of course, these days most councils in the civilized world have recycling facilities, maybe even Bellinger. Even troglodytic Coffs Harbour City Council now does, and recently gave Sandy Beach residents three wheelie bins per household. Red for domestic garbage, green for garden refuse, and yellow for recyclables. It's very commendable, and nice to see from a council that has a reputation of being as progressive as King George III.
Trouble is, along with the bins they gave each household an A4, black-and-white, small-print guide on how to use the bins. It's about as much use as tits on a bull. It should have been colour-coded, maybe something to stick on the fridge, but instead it is alphabetical, extremely complicated and requires a PhD in semantics to decipher. (And several of us have wryly noted that it contains information entirely at odds with the instructions printed on the top of the bins.)
Worst of all, it doesn't have a listing for
cans. You know,
cans, those things that every ten or fifteen years some people buy, use and dispose of. You can look under 'C' for 'Cans', or 'T' for 'Tin cans', but you won't find them listed there. Now, let's talk quietly, just you and me, in confidence. Have you ever bought and used a can? It's not as though they went out of fashion, is it? I was at the supermarket this morning, and I started counting cans. I stopped after 79,639 when the manager came and asked if I wanted him to call an ambulance as I was prostrate from sheer can-counting exhaustion.
This is just a friendly request to those people at Coffs City Council, who (as you will know if you have read past editions of A Sandy Beach Almanac) count me as one of their favourite people, and, indeed, it is said, have a glossy 8 X 10 photograph of me in their lunch room. I'm told it is affixed to a dart board.
A humble request: How about a proper recycling guide for the 50,000 people in the city and surrounding districts?
Tagged: recycling, sustainability, permaculture, environment, activism
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