Recycling, mostly!

Our daughter lives about fifteen minutes away from us by car but that fifteen minutes puts her into a different borough. Where she lives, if she puts the wrong stuff in one of her refuse bins, the bin men have instructions not to empty that bin. This is rather important nowadays as refuse collection works on an ever-extending cycle. Ours used to work on a two weekly cycle but now works on a three week cycle: week 1 - general non-recyclable rubbish bin + compostable bin; week 2 - recyclable glass and plastic bin + compostable bin; week 3 - paper and cardboard bin + compostable bin.

Presumably the push to recycle as much as possible is supposed to reduce the amount of stuff that goes in the general rubbish bin. The rest has rules that vary from place to place. We are told to put tetra packs, fruit juice cartons and the like, made of cardboard but with a plasticised lining, into the paper and cardboard recycling. My daughter is told to put them into glass and plastic recycling. I used to recycle yoghurt pots but now I find that they are made from the wrong kind of plastic and should go into general rubbish. How complicated it is to do the right thing by the planet.

Then there are the plastic trays that certain products are packaged in. Which ones can be recycled and which not? Black ones, according to what I have read, cannot be recycled because the colouring makes them "worthless". (Apparently packaging red meat on black plastic trays makes it look more attractive. Who knew?) But does the same rule apply to other colours of plastic? And is this why yoghurt pots are not recyclable?

It's about time product designers got their act together and made their packaging as simply-recyclable as possible. The Recycling Association - yes, there does seem to be such an association - talks about "the Pringles factor". This snack in a tube is a nightmare to recyclers, it seems, because their packaging consists of a cardboard tube with a metal base and a plastic lid. How hard is it, I ask myself, for people to dismantle the tube into its component parts and recycle accordingly? Maybe I am too sensible and Pringles eaters too busy!

Here is a different kind of recycling. An actress I have never heard of took the place of Hadley Freeman to write a column in the Guardian Weekend magazine. She wrote about shopping at TK Maxx as a kind of therapy. Lots of people indulge in retail therapy, of course, but hers is limited to TK Maxx, a company which specialises in selling brand-name goods at reduced prices. Some people manage to find amazing bargains there. Personally I find them so overwhelming that I can only rarely be bothered to trawl through their stacks of stuff. Even then, I don't often find anything that appeals to me.

This actress, however, finds browsing the different sections of this store a great stress reliever. "As soon as I walk through the doors, the tension knot in my chest dissolves..." she wrote. Then came this:

"I often go after auditions, to stop my hands from shaking. I usually need to pop in anyway, to return the latest "character" item of discount clothing I've bought: an ill-fitting blouse I've picked up to pass as a tough CIA agent, or the stretch-denim jacket adorned with rhinestones I was sure would make me more convincing as an adolescent runaway."

So she buys items of clothing, wears them once to an audition and returns them and gets her money back. This is a kind of borrowing that amounts to stealing. Surely there are agencies where actors can hire clothes for character-style! But then, that would involve some payment whereas the other method lets you "borrow" the clothes for free!!

When people indulge in this kind of thing, do they wear the clothes with the labels and tags still attached, carefully but probably uncomfortably tucking them out of sight?

Here's something else, an odd fact gleaned from all the stuff around about political figures and their popularity ratings. Diana Muntz, of the University of Pennsylvania, surveyed more than 100 Americans and found that the more Harry Potter books they had read, the less they liked Donald Trump. Her study is called "Harry Potter and the Deadly Donald". Not a very scientific study but quite amusing. I think so anyway.

And finally here is a link to a set of photos showing why politicians should try to avoid being photographed while eating.