Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Waste recovery is essential for reducing the volume of waste, as well as reducing the amount of material that can be recovered from landfills.
For some years now, not being able to recycle household waste, such as food scraps, has been one of my concerns. As I live in an urban area and don't have my own garden, I had no way of doing so.
Last week, I was visited by two city council employees who were distributing recycling kits to the residents of my building. In this case, bio-recycling!
I was delighted to open the door to them. They explained it in simple terms and clarified my doubts. In this first phase, as there are already collection points for food waste in other locations in the municipality, but not yet in my area of residence, an intermediate stage is planned.
At the moment, we are asked to separate bio-waste (food waste) and place it in a green bag, which can be deposited in one of the street containers for unsorted waste. This green bag allows the system to select it and separate it from the rest of the waste.
When the system for depositing bio-recyclable waste in special containers is implemented in my area, it will no longer be necessary to use the green bags, which are currently provided free of charge, and waste can be placed in a bag of any color. To deposit waste in these special containers, we will have a card that allows the lid to be unlocked, preventing the accidental deposit of other types of waste.
At the end of this publication, there is a video produced and published on YouTube by the Oeiras City Council, which describes this entire process and can be viewed with English subtitles.
For as long as I can remember, I have always taken care to separate my waste. I remember as a child, when I went on vacation to my grandmother's house in the countryside, I loved sorting glass bottles. At the time, in the 1980s and 1990s, there was only one container for unsorted waste and two large ones. One was for clear glass containers and the other was for colored glass.
Just the other day, I was talking to Tarazkp, saying that I couldn't understand how there were still people who didn't separate their trash. And that they even put 5-liter plastic bottles in the unsorted trash, without even flattening them... In other words, it's bad on two fronts: they don't separate the plastic, and they put empty, unflattened containers in the unsorted trash bins, which only takes up a lot of space, causing them to fill up more quickly and increasing the costs paid to landfill materials that are valuable and can be reused.
Recycling was one of the topics taught in the most basic subjects in elementary school. We were more than encouraged to separate our waste. I don't know what happened in the meantime... but it seems that people are less and less interested in or caring for a planet that belongs to EVERYONE! The responsibility to reduce our personal ecological footprint should be everyone's duty. We must ensure that our brief passage through here is as unnoticed as possible.
As tarazkp so aptly put it:
"The world cold be better with us. But it will definitely be better without us."
