Diary of a Shopkeeper, 18th October
Friday was one of the happiest days of my life. At 8am I pulled a heavy, clinking, rattling green bin from the garage to the roadside. And at 6pm I came home from work to find a completely empty bin lying on its side. It was having a snooze after three months of hard labour looking after our glass recycling.
Joy! The weight of all that recycling had been weighing on me nearly as heavily as it had on the creaking wheels of the bin.
Three months? I’m afraid so. In August I was in Aberdeen for a hospital appointment on glass-collection day. And in September I got mixed up and put the plastics bin out on what turned out to be glass day. Much was the gnashing of teeth and the smiting of foreheads that day.
So last Friday was the first chance to get rid of all the glass we’d collected since July 17th.
It was an embarrassingly large amount. Wine bottles, yes: as a wine merchant I do enjoy a good glass or two. But also bottles for vinegar and chilli sauce. There were wee jars for jam, marmalade and honey. And big jars for haricot beans, peanut butter and tomato passata – and cherries in liqueur that I got from Shearer’s Christmas shop last year, lost at the back of the cupboard, and finally discovered and devoured on County Show night.
All in all, it seems I drop some or other glass item into the bin most days, and after three months that amounts to a huge amount.
In fact, the bin actually filled to capacity back in late September, and since then I’ve been collecting the overflow in a series of cardboard boxes. So as soon as I pulled it back in the garage on Friday and decanted all the overflow into it, the bin was immediately three quarters full!
And still a full month to go until it gets emptied again.
I better not miss the November collection date, or I’ll be back in a never-ending cycle of full bins and overflowing overflow boxes. Either that or I’ll have to rejoin Bruce Brass in the queue for the Hatston dump – maybe taking my own folding chair and thermos this time.
When I said above that I’d put an embarrassingly large amount of glass out, I was joking about the wine bottles. The real embarrassment is that a small, two-person household can produce so much waste. And that’s just the glass. There’s also the plastics bin, the tin can caddy, and the general rubbish bin.
Not much wonder the world’s resources are being drained, and its seas and land polluted with waste, if two folk in the West Mainland can’t live their lives without creating so much bruck.
Thank goodness for the growing grassroots movement to reduce waste and increase recycling, so we can move towards a genuine circular economy. In fact there are two kinds of circle required: one that keeps money earned in Orkney circulating here as long as possible, and one that minimises waste of both materials and energy.
Thank goodness too for the hundred good ideas being generated and shared in the Sustainable Orkney conference, which was mean to happen at the Picky in March, but has moved online instead. By the time you read this we’ll be half-way through six weeks of Tuesday evening sessions.
Highlights for me so far have included Steve Sankey talking about the prospects for a greener tourism industry, Adele Lidderdale on how she set up an online zero-waste shop, and Rosemary Moon on food consumption. (Check out www.oref.co.uk for details of the sessions still to come.)
As Rosemary pointed out, making the food that sustains us sustainable is a big topic. It covers how it’s grown, how it’s processed, how it’s transported to Orkney (or transported from Orkney, if we’re taking about exporting our own produce) and even how we store and cook it. And crucially, how much we waste.
Packaging comes into it too, of course. It’s unthinkable that, in 20 years’ time, I’ll be putting out dozens of jars and bottles for recycling every month, and filling four or five bin bags every fortnight. There’s no future in that way of living.
It’s as clear as glass.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 22nd October. Other diaries will appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.