Rubbish and recycling

This is I'm sure another contentious topic but it sparked out of debate with some business colleagues, all expats last night whilst we were discussing some business opportunities, we also got side tracked onto house moves, renovations and ultimately disposal of waste.

One of the things we've all noticed on our trips back to the UK is fly tipping, we still get UK TV here and regularly there are stories of fly tipping investigations and how much disposal of fly tipped rubbish costs and ultimately a prosecution, but at what cost?

So we evaluated three different countries and the infrastructure in place to determine why as a general rule you don't see uncontrolled fly tipping in either France or Spain.

Where our son and a lot of our family live in the UK you get bin collections from the house each week in combination of green (general waste), blue (recycling but only very specific things, for example not all plastic), blue basket (glass), brown (garden, which you have to pay for) and grey bucket (organic). Outside of that if you want anything you have to goto the local tip, your vehicle must be registered, it is by appointment and you have to pay to dispose of certain things, like paint cans.

Now France, no doorstep collections, everything is taken to communal bins (never more than a few hundred meters away), they are emptied in rotation pretty much everyday of the year. Bins are in three categories, grey (general waste), green (glass) and yellow (recycling, metal, plastic and cardboard/paper, no sorting required and no problem with the wrong type of plastic). Local dechetterie in France, vehicle has to be registered, for private individuals everything is free, for business there is a nominal "per load" fee of approximately 15€, oh and no appointment necessary. You don't pay to dispose of paint cans, oil, plasterboard or anything like that, our local dechetterie has probably 15 different skips and the local staff are always on hand to ensure that everything goes into the right skip and are very willing to help sort stuff.

This is just the opposite of the UK experience where everyone hides things to get them into the general waste to avoid paying extra and the local staff stand over you policing you.

Finally Spain, very similar to France, grey (general), green (glass), blue (cardboard) and yellow (metal and plastic) communal bins emptied on rotation. As for the tip or punto limpio, no car registration, no appointment, lots of skips and helpful staff, plus at our local limpios there is no fee even for businesses.

So to be fair you do get what can best be described as controlled fly tipping in both Spain and France, it is not uncommon for people to leave things by the communal bins they no longer need, a desk, a microwave and then it mysteriously disappears, usually collected by someone and recycled / reused.

No one in France or Spain expects door step collections, rubbish doesn't pile up and the repair, reuse, recycle culture is made easy, none of this the wrong type of plastic in your blue bin. I'll confess when we lived in the UK I got fed-up with sorting plastic and it all went in the recycling bin.

Cultural norms like an expectation of doorstep collections need to change for the whole repair, reuse, recycle culture to actually work. The solution is not to goto biweekly doorstep collections as that just results in unsanitary rubbish building up at peoples accomodation and frankly more uncontrolled flytipping. 

Spain and France also have this recycle / reuse culture, we recently purchased a duplex apartment on an Urbanisation in Neuva Andalucia and as part of that we wanted to update the three bathrooms we had, now my experience of doing that in the UK is the plumber comes along and says we need to rip everything out and start again. The approach in France and Spain is very different the culture is how do we build on what we have. It extends to reusing materials as well, for example we replaced a shower tray, the plumber broke up the old one and used it as hard core for the base when combined with concrete for the new one, result was the amount of rubbish we actually threw away was greatly reduced and it saved money. 

Many other examples of exist, but the overall point is cultural norms have to change maybe Brexit combined with the state of the UK economy overall will drive some of this change.