A clever Latin title was to go here

My apartment, and most especially the bathroom thereof, desperately needs cleaned. I don't want to do this, and so have spent the last twenty four hours busily finding other tasks that 'need' done right away.

After lunch, I decided that the thing to do would be to go through the pile of accumulated mail, and decide what amongst it I really needed to keep (bank statements), what I was going to keep for sentimental reasons (old love letters, real or imagined), and what I could throw out. The folly of this course of action quickly became apparent, but I stuck it out for a good couple of hours before finally abandoning it.

You would not believe the amount of junk I threw out. Or, unfortunately, you probably would, since I suspect everyone in the country, and perhaps the Western world, similarly accumulates rubbish, much of which you can't throw out immediately, for various reasons, but that you then forget to throw away once their usefulness has expired.

Personally, I am glad that so much paper is just casually wasted like that. After all, it's not like there are issues with using paper for frivolous matters, or that we're all supposed to be doing a part in helping with the environment. (Oh, right...) And it's not like they make it difficult to at least recycle this junk paper by putting personal information on it (again, oh, right...), or inserting staples that have to be removed before recycling (again...).

Perhaps the thing that most annoys me is the seeming need of every single organisation to provide an "exclusive member's magazine" to their customers. I get one from my old university, my bank, the AA, at least two pension providers, a company I happen to have shares in (and that only because I couldn't be bothered actually selling them when the share price was high, and am now holding on to until it becomes high again), Sky, and probably a few others that I have forgotten about. Each time one arrives, I feel obliged to at least scan through it for anything interesting, almost invariably draw a complete blank, and then get to throw them away.

(I would argue at this point that perhaps they should stop sending me this junk mail, and take the money saved from my costs. However, it doesn't work like that. Most of these magazines are full of targeted adverts, sold on the premise that people who drive are more likely to be interested in things to make driving more pleasant than are people who don't drive. These adverts subsidise the cost of the magazines, and may even subsidise the cost of the products in question. So, perhaps I should ask that they simply cut out the middle-man and just recycle the magazines straight away.)

Still, at least Falkirk Council genuinely do a decent job with their recycling (despite the inability to recycle appliances that I blogged about before). For most things, the only thing that needs to be done is to drop them into the Blue Bin, and are then sorted at the collections end. Frankly, this is the model that all councils need to adopt - if recycling is made hard for the end-user, people just won't bother.

For things that they don't accept in the Blue Bin, notably glass, they have made the provision of a great many recycling points throughout the council, such that a point is located within about five minutes walk. Can't really say fairer than that.

However, they still don't provide a facility for recycling carrier bags, and neither do the local supermarkets. This is something that should be looked into - too many of these bags are just being thrown away, too few are reused, and this is just too big a waste.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that I have stepped up my recycling efforts, and now recycle more than half of what I throw away. This I consider to be progress.

Oh, in case you're curious: the original title of this post was going to be "Sic Viresco", which was the motto of my old school. According to the former headmaster of the school, it translated as "and thus we become green". However, I figured I better check the translation before I used it, only to find that it better translates as "thus I flourish". As mottoes go, this makes much more sense than the previous translation. However, it doesn't really help in titling a blog post about recycling. Oh well.