I love me a recycling centre. Over the past year, it's become a second home to me, from depositing…read morethe waste from renovations, to my weekly jaunt to commit my rubbish offerings to the recycling gods. I've noticed how quickly trying to recycle overtakes your life - and how much wasted resource ends up on your doorstep, from junk mail, to magazines, envelopes, medicine boxes, til receipts.... trying to make sure you recycle everything can become overwhelming. Don't get me started on composting...
Anyway, I digress. The Musselburgh recycling depot is great - plenty of guys standing around ready to help you when you don't know which skip to launch your unwanted goods into. Metal, plastic, oil, electrical goods, standard recycling, garden waste, books, clothes, shoes, (the latter 3 donated to Salvation Army) I think they cover nigh on everything. It's a great one stop shop. It has comedy value stuffed toys waving you in and bright blue smurf-gnomes wishing you farewell. I just wish places like this didnt' get abused so much. As I walked down the path from the plastics skip, one gentleman, who had taken pains to drive to the centre, launched his plastics into the landfill skip (kinda at my head too, as he was a little too lazy to actually walk to the skip and threw it from his car). I saw another lady just dumping any old thing into a skip. It felt a little lazy - given the fact such pains are taken to give you as much opportunity to separate, it seems that for some, it's still a little too much effort. That makes me sadface, but it doesn't detract from the place itself.
Given the volume of waste we produce each minute, hour and day, its good such places exist. It bothers me to think that sometimes it feels we will eventually drown in our own waste, the consumerists that we are, but that is the world we live in. At least if you are paying something back, it has to count for something, right? Just put it in the right skip, that's all I ask.