Rubbish and trash is not smelly, it’s the uncleaned food that is.
In 2019, I spent a bit of time in Seattle, where my brother lives. If you don’t know, the Pacific Northwest is quite possibly the most liberal and progressive region of USA. If you have ever seen Portlandia, this is a little insight into the mindset of the Pacific Northwest.
Anyways, I was pleasantly surprised at their rubbish collection system. There were three separate bins:
Compost, to be collected in your own compostable bag
Recyclables, which includes paper and cardboard, plastic fruit containers, plastic yogurt containers, glass bottles,
Trash
But this is the thing, for the trash and recyclables, everything must be washed clean. If your bins smell at the weekly collection, the city will not collect them for you.
I love when obvious things like this blow my mind. I have always been very conscious of avoiding plastic waste but actually clean the things that need to be recycled, never quite occurred. It is that disconnection to “how stuff works” and out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality we need to defeat. A year prior, I learned about Eco Bricks, as part of a project that a friend of mine and I wanted to start in Lombok, Indonesia. Eco Bricks, is not a perfect solution but neither is recycling. Eco Bricks is the process of taking plastic drink bottles, and stuffing them rock solid with clean plastics, aluminium, and other non-destructible trash. The brick bottles are then used as you would bricks, put together with cement or a specific mud-mix, to make outdoor planters or even houses. The hope is that when efficient and affordable technology comes around, Eco Bricks can be removed to be recycled properly. Plastics do not even begin their 1000-year long decomposition process without a lot of heat, so when Eco Bricks are protected from the sun and its heat, it sits there patiently waiting rather than being incinerated or found in the ocean.
to me unless I was reusing or recycling within
Then I transitted through Beijing for a day; flights were cheaper and one of my besties live there. And she told me about their new composting standards, which comes with an aunty that polices everyone’s rubbish.
