Our house sometimes feels like the front office of a posting station due to the number of deliveries, parcels & letters that come through our door. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the amount of packaging that comes with when you have a wife who has a slight addiction to shopping & can’t resist a bargain. We have fondly named the side of our house “cardboard alley” due to amount of recyclable material we store down there. As soon as I have it cleared another van full of deliveries come my way.
Everyone here is aware that I know my way to the local recycling tip. When you are redecorating/house maintaining as much as we do here it is inevitable that a tip run becomes a weekly occurrence. So much so that 90% of the reason we changed our car was to get one that could pull the trailer we had acquired from the in-laws. I was thrilled at this because now there is no reason for me not to go to the tip every weekend (yayyyy, can I go while the football is on too?). Whenever I visit I am starting to recognise the regulars who walk around looking in all of the skips & collection points for something to take home & I always wonder if that is the way my life is heading.
The bane of my life when it comes to the deliveries though is not the cardboard or even the wrapping but the unnecessary amount of polystyrene. This is harder to recycle, you pick it out and a thousand tiny fragments break off all over the freshly hoovered floor and its awkward shape just gets in the way. And whoever invented the little polystyrene pieces needs to play a never ending game of marshmallow with them & see how many they can fit in their mouth before they understand how annoying they are. They get everywhere, especially after the kids have jumped into it like a miniature ball pit & Percy starts knocking them about under bits of furniture.
When Rory was toilet trained I was elated, not because of the milestone but because that is 5 nappies a day I no longer have to squeeze into the bin, 70 nappies each bin collection day; the average child uses 5353 nappies in their life, so for me it was 10,706 nappies worth of bin space. Think of all the room for activities in your bin. This doesn’t even take into account the meaty-filled to the brim, weighs more than the child sort of nappies that are a regular occurrence.
All in all, my life is a circular battle of recycling, standing on the bin & tip runs. I think management of recycling is one of the key aspects of becoming a grown-up & I am working towards it. Occasionally if there is no space left in our bin the night before pick-up I sometimes go into fox mode and start rummaging through my neighbours bins to see if they have capacity to accommodate my overspill (let’s hope they don’t read this). I did notice a few weeks ago that my next door neighbours bin was half full after 2 weeks, this astonished me especially considering I thought I was fairly good at recycling as to how far I still have to go. As I write this is realise that me walking round looking in my neighbours bins is probably how those who walk around the tip looking for ‘treasure’ aka other peoples junk in the skips first started.
Mr THTMM x