A load of old rubbish?
Several years ago, during one of my rare attempts to work in an office environment, for one month my boss was maniacally bent on the issue of hygiene. Every morning Yiannis (not his real name) would come to the office, gather us all together and talk for an hour about how filthy we all were. He would lecture us on his grandmother, who “didn’t have a proper floor, just the one made of clay, but nevertheless swept it three times a day”, and then would move on to the subject of mud and how it breeds cockroaches (it was a rainy February, there was plenty of mud outside and indeed we would carry it on our shoes into the office).
One day, while having his usual outburst about cockroaches, Yiannis looked across the room and probably saw something peculiar in my eyes since suddenly he turned his attention to me.
“Ms Agnieszka, do you have anything to add to the matter?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr Yiannis,” I answered cheerfully, “I have been just thinking… Would it be possible for you to purchase a doormat and place it inside the door?”
Needless to say, I resigned a week later.
This story came to mind this week while I was reading in the paper about the three-colour recycling bins introduced throughout the city in June by Nicosia Municipality. According to local recycling and environmental experts, the project has several weaknesses: a) the bins are too small and therefore it is “economically unviable” for any existing recycling company to recycle their contents; b) the materials put into the blue bins (metal, glass and plastic) cannot be recycled together and separating them is a hassle; c) last but not least, the city doesn’t have a recycling plant, hence anything put into the bins ends up at the landfill site in Kotsiatis anyway.
Nicosia mayor Michael Zambelas defended the project, saying that the most important thing about it was not the fact that the recycling wasn’t really taking place but that Nicosians saw the bins, learnt how they worked and therefore could “develop an environmental sense”. He also insisted that the bins were the right size, approved by the European Union and that the real recycling would start in about two years.
A government official said the government has its own recycling project that a) had nothing to do with the municipality; b) used bigger bins; and c) would be in full operation across the island, in two years as well.
Now, I am not a recycling expert but since I am in London this week, staying in a two-storey, four-flat Victorian building in Finchley Road, after reading all that I got out of my friend’s place and roamed passionately through the rubbish bins in front of her windows to check how recycling is done in Camden. The equation here is simple: four flats means four big containers for the usual kind of waste and two small plastic boxes, more or less the same size as the bins introduced by Zambellas, for glass, paper, cans and textiles, without any separation.
I didn’t leave my investigation at that. To learn more, I called another friend who lives in a different borough and therefore recycles in a different way. She doesn’t have boxes but special bags, again more or less the same size as Zambellas’ and yes again, she puts everything in there. The separation is done at a later stage.
I proceeded and phoned my mum in the different universe (ie Poland) who lives in a big block of flats, surrounded by four other similarly sized buildings. They have neither boxes nor bags there but several very large skips: for normal waste, glass, textiles, paper, metal, etc, everything separate.
Now let’s come back to Cyprus, the land of enormous piles of waste, since, according to statistics announced a year ago, Cypriots are the second biggest producers of rubbish per head in the EU and throw away 724kg of trash every year (just imagine, this means two kg per person per day).
Does this huge rubbish production mean that Cyprus is also the second in terms of the number of bins in streets of their main towns? No, you must be joking. Does it mean that it has a well-defined rubbish disposal policy? Come on.
In Nicosia, in my small neighbourhood, for about fifty households, there are two big rubbish trolleys for usual waste, a small bin designed for passers-by (actually it disappeared a month ago), and several privately-owned medium size rubbish containers that on Sundays and Wednesdays, when the collection service is due, overflow, stink and are a total mess.
Recycling bins? Forget it. In my neighbourhood, we never worry about such things. We have never seen one anyway.
