Worse Than Pointless

I took our recycling etc to the tip today (the bin lorry doesn’t come up the lane to the house so we store it all in the shed and do a tip run every few months).  Argyll and Bute council in it’s wisdom has a new system.  This includes residents putting all cardboard, plastic and tins in the same skip and 'a machine sorts it'.  Completely pointless – what you can’t see from this photo is what else is in this pile of ‘recycling’ – dirty tins and plastic, used coffee cups, wet cardboard, and other things that are not recyclable.  When I raised this with one of the workers there (and I really don’t blame them, they are pretty powerless in this situation, plus there aren’t enough of them to police what people do) I was told that recycling no longer happens in Tobermory and that everything is sent off to Glasgow to some recycling plant there.  I know that contaminated loads are sent to landfill.  So a carbon audit would show how worse than pointless this exercise is – a lorry will come and pick up the containers, take them on the ferry and then drive the 100 odd miles to Glasgow, only for the whole lot to be dumped in landfill there.  I despair – if individuals and councils can’t get this relatively small action right what hope is there for the massive changes that need to occur imminently if we want to avoid completely destroying the next generations futures?