Household waste

( in the US trash collection was easy )

( in Perthshire it's more awkward but we still recycle plenty )

So, it's with irritation and doubts that I discover that our 240l general waste bin is to be replaced with a 140l one; they are collected fortnightly. The larger bin already gets rather full most weeks so to have its capacity nearly halved makes me wonder to what extent we can get away with jamming stuff down inside it. Our family size of four (plus a cat) doesn't qualify us for anything extra. I suppose we will have to try even harder to recycle but, as we already recycle much of what we can, far more likely is that we will just keep extra bags in which to put the less disgusting waste and occasionally drive them to one of the council sites.

I can't help but wonder how wrong-headed all this is: how much does the environment benefit from our having to,

1. use plenty of hot water and detergent to wash out the food from the worst-contaminated packaging so that it too can be recycled


2. separately drive to various council sites because they tighten what they are willing to collect from our homes?
   

I also strongly suspect that their pressure would be far better applied to the vendors who overpackage products in the first place. Especially at our income level it's not as if we're spoilt for choice. I didn't want half this packaging in the first place.

It was especially annoying after first moving here when we had all the packaging from our move too. After any kind of large clearout in this country I am already used to having weeks of backlog of waste in the garage. Who this benefits I've no idea.

Ignoring my family

Given that I need to increase my personal productivity readers might notice that productivity's been a recurring theme of late.

I get a lot more done when I am alone for long periods. However, when my family are around, they are often engaged in their own activities, not interrupting me. I think I am just instinctively trying to fit in with them anyway, to be available when something interactive or communal does happen. In my position it's perhaps a bad habit but it's been hard to shake. They interact with each other about computer games that they play but I generally try to avoid games. There are other times when it's not really clear what's going on but perhaps I don't actually have to wait until that's determined before doing something anyway.

Festival days like today might be an exception but I have been getting more done lately by imagining what I would do if alone and by not feeling bad about antisocially abandoning my family to head upstairs to my desk when they are just buried in their electronic devices or television shows I can miss or suchlike. I make it clear that I am quite interruptible and often I can get a good hour of work in before something more like family time seems to again occur.

It does mean that I have been getting less reading done of late.

More poached eggs

Yesterday I went to poach some eggs and found that one of the four egg receptacles was missing from the poaching pan. Neither mst3kmoxie nor I could find it anywhere in the kitchen. Today Miranda found it in the recycling bin outside. People perhaps need to be a bit more careful in how they put away the dry items from the racks. I suppose this is one risk that at least I hadn't anticipated from our cleaning food out of plastic containers before recycling them.