A Sandy Beach Almanac



You've landed at Sandy Beach, NSW, Australia: Lat. -30.15331, Long. 153.19960, UT +10:00 – local map & zoom Google map. I live in a cabin on this beach, 25 kilometres north of the traffic and shops of Coffs Harbour, 600 km north of Sydney. My intention is to post observations of Nature and life within 1 km (1,000 paces) of my South Pacific home.

 

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Monday, April 17, 2006

Recycling is now IN. But no cans please.

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?

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Pip, I found your site through an RSS feed on a friend's blog. From the bits I've explored, you've got an excellent little site here. As for me, I'm not in or even near Vancouver any longer - I imagined to escape The Big Smoke about two years ago. Now I'm enjoying the fresh air and wilderness of northern BC, in a wee forestry town called Vanderhoof that is about 900 km to the north of Vangroovy - latitude 54 deg, longitude -124 deg.

Just wanted to comment on your plight of recycling. When I moved to this village of 4,400 people, with a surrounding rural population of another 6-8,000, I was surprised to find out that recycling does not exist here. The best that the more environmentally minded of us can do is save up our recycling in our basements and trek it into the nearest city, about 100 km to the east. And even in that city (80,000 people), although a person can recycle paper, milk jugs and tin cans, it is impossible to recycle glass. To do that, I would need to drive another 200 km to *another* town to the south, or drive 300 km west of Vanderhoof to another town. I have about two years' worth of glass accumulation in my basement waiting to make the journey.

Fortunately, there is a little group of forward-thinking folk who have been working diligently for over a year now, to try to convince the village council to try a paper and cardboard recycling pilot project. They are making headway, but it is a slow, slow battle.

So, it's not just parts of Australia that have that frontier mentality - you know, just dump those cans/glass jars/cardboard in the bush for some future generation to deal with. It is still happening on the opposite side of the planet too.

Hope to visit your fair country again soon! I was in Sydney briefly last December, which was a poor representation of Australia, but the Blue Mountains gave me a taste of what better places there are to experience. :)

3:17 AM  
Blogger Pip Wilson said...

Sorry it took me days to approve your comment. It slipped pst me in my emails. I hope your next trip to Oz takes you well away from Sydney and that you have a great time.

9:16 AM  

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