Recycling

Pig in the Kitchen has burst my baggie bubble, by asking if I feel guilty about where these little plastic darlings end up, in all their non-biodegradability shame. She has a point. I have been meaning to write about recycling for ages, so I thought this would be a good moment.

When we first moved here, I was rather horrified at the lack of environmental concern. It has become such a way of life in Britain. Here, recycling is a minority interest. If pressed, most people would agree that it is a Good Thing (difficult to argue the opposite), but few people actually do anything about it. It’s not that easy to do anything about it. You would have to look very hard to find a recycling bin in a car park; in fact, I’m not sure I can think of any at all. At first we paid a supplement to our trash collection service, and once a fortnight they would collect our recycling. We gave that up for three reasons. First, I don’t like paying for recycling if I don’t have to. Second, we had to put it out sorted into four supermarket carrier bags (newspapers, glossy magazines, cans, glass) in an open box, and on more than one occasion I found the wind had taken the lightweight plastic box halfway down the street. I imagined the newspapers and magazines had gone the same way. It’s very windy round here, and open trash boxes are not the way forward. Third, having witnessed the collection of the sorted items, dumped together into the back of a lorry inside their plastic bags, I did doubt that it ended up anywhere other than a landfill site. Maybe I just saw them on a bad day, but I didn’t feel I wanted to continue paying for the service.

We now collect all our recycling in our garage, and once every now and again, load it into the minivan and take it to a recycling center. It’s an intriguing experience. The place is staffed by volunteers, whose average age must be in the 70s. How shaming that the lead is being taken by the older generation who have little personal stake in all this. One old lady sorts and assists, going from bin to bin slowly and painfully with her zimmer frame. You have to dump your recycling items into the appropriate bin, so it is quite a task, sorting out the different plastics and papers. They recycle everything in great detail – even the lids of milk containers. There is often a line of cars if you go on a Saturday, so a round trip can easily take an hour. Our kids quite enjoy sorting and dumping, so we sell it to them as a fun trip, but I suppose you have to be fairly committed to recycling to be bothered.

On the depressing side, this recycling center, though very admirable, is small. There is space for no more than a dozen cars to park and unload at one time. The bins are not much larger than the kind of bin you see in every supermarket car park in the UK. It serves a city of over 300,000. Does that tell you how much recycling activity there is here? On the optimistic side, I do believe that there is more awareness and activity now than when we arrived, less than 2 years ago. The school has set up a working group, the preschool collects plastic bags to recycle, Dillons has a bin at the entrance for Dillons bags. It’s not high on most people’s agenda, but the beginnings are there.

So Pig, to answer your question. No, I didn’t feel guilty about baggies, but I do (a bit) now. In my defence, I don’t use THAT many (how much Playmobil do you think I have?), and in the kitchen, is it any better to use cling film? You have made me stop and think, though, you and the commenters who wash and reuse their baggies. I have never been a washer and reuser of baggies, but henceforth I undertake to be so. There you are, lovely Bloggy Friends. You are slowly changing the world through your blogging. As for you, Pig, don’t tell me you weren’t very grateful for plastic bags on this occasion (make sure you read the 'Addendum'). And none of us would blame you at all for not recycling those ones...

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Bags

Bags. Seems an obvious one to follow ‘Tea’. But here I’m talking about Ziploc bags. One of the three defining features of American domestic life: motherhood, apple pie and Ziploc bags.

When we lived in Scotland, I had been intrigued by the frequency with which Ziploc bags came into play when in the company of the American women I knew. I suppose, looking back, it was because when I saw them, it was often at group social gatherings which involved food. And where there is food, there must be Ziploc bags.

If you have them on your shopping list, you must add a good few minutes to your anticipated shopping time. The choice is bewildering. There is the basic kind, with the strip at the top that you pinch closed. Then there is the advanced kind, with a slider that you whizz across. If you want to go really up-market, you can get ones with a double strip, ones that are super-thick, ones that have a white space on them to write on, ones that are specially designed for the freezer, ones that do your ironing and read your children stories. Each type comes in a range of sizes (would you have a clue how big a bag holds a gallon? or a quart? I didn’t), and then each type and size comes in a choice of brands: Ziploc, Glad and the supermarket own brand. I like the idea of buying Glad bags. I could put my glad rags in my Glad bags. So what with choice of type, choice of size and choice of brand, I’m just grateful I learned how to do Venn diagrams at school, otherwise I wouldn’t have any chance of making a decision.

The other thing I’ve learned about Ziploc bags is that they are invaluable for things way beyond the realm of food. Playmobil bits (aaargh!), Barbie’s endless little plastic accessories and the minute scraps of material that she calls fashion-wear, half-used wax crayons that have lost their box, small pieces of games where the manufacturer didn't bother to think about how you would keep the darn thing together once you'd taken off the shrink-wrap (I offer you the monkeys in Monkey Business, or the balls in Hungry Hippos as examples), a pine cone collection, a special stones collection, 5 toothbrushes on an aeroplane, foreign coins, glow-in-the-dark stars that don't stick well on the wall but can't possibly be thrown away, errant playdough… what did I used to do with these things?

I was standing in a friend’s kitchen in England over the summer, and as she got out the cling film, I started talking to her about my conversion to Ziploc bags and how I now use them for everything. “Well,” she said, “I’m pleased to hear about it. It would be a shame if you invested years of your life settling in a foreign country, and found there was no cultural interchange at all.” Ah, those widened horizons.

Oh, and they call them ‘baggies’. I love that.

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