January 15th, 2020

The city of Venice, where we live, recycles. In fact they are really big on recycling.   The local grocery store even has separate bins for egg cartons, plastic bags and styrofoam plates!  Area parks have separate trash containers for regular garbage, paper, cans, bottles and plastic.  It's kind of a thing here.

As soon as we moved in to this house we were issued two small red recycle bins.  These above.  One was for paper and lightweight cardboard like cereal boxes broken down flat.  The other was for bottles and cans, rinsed out of course.  I kept them in the utility room.  There they sat, out of the way, right around the corner from the kitchen, easy to access.  Once a week I would schlep them out to the curb for pick up and then lug them back in to be refilled.   The paper bin I took out every week.  The bottle and can bin perhaps once every two weeks.  I have never completely filled it.  

Fine and Dandy.  We had a system and it worked.

But today a new bin arrived in our driveway.  We have now been issued a new much larger Blue bin.  It looks remarkably like the garbage bin, just a different colour.  It has an attached lid and wheels.  I can wheel it to the end of the driveway instead of lift and carry it as I did with the red bins.  The lazybutt part of me digs this in a big sort of way.

At 65 gallons, the new bin is just too large to keep in the utility room so it shall be consigned to the great outdoors, lurking near the side door hunkered against the house like the big garbage bin.  One to the right of the door, the other to the left.  Not quite as convenient but not completely unreasonable either.  Just a matter of adapting to a new way of doing things.

Along with the new blue wheeled recycle bin came some instructions.  In fact we got the instructions twice, once in a little plastic zippy bag and the second time imprinted on the top of the bin. I am not joking.  This is not a sticky or something that can be peeled off.  It's permanently imprinted on the lid.  I guess they want to be SURE that we know how to do this.

,Some of these instructions are actually good solid information.  Like what we can and cannot recycle.  Like empty and rinsed aluminum cans (yes) pizza boxes (no), empty, and rinsed milk jugs (yes) and diapers (no) - I cannot believe that they had tell us that.  It means that somebody tried leaving nasty old dirty/wet diapers in the recycle bin at least once.  Yuck.

It also instructs us set it at the curb facing the road and to leave a 3 foot perimeter around the recyle bin.  Seriously.  Nothing around it...no other can (like the garbage can) no low hanging branches or utility poles or cars, large dogs, small children or well anything within 3 feet when it's set out at the curb.  This is because it's an automated pick up.  The trucks have this thingamabog that lifts, dumps and resets the bins without any human being injuring themselves lifting some of the stuff people put in their garbage bins.  okey dokey.  No worries. I can manage this.

In the plastic zippybag was a FAQ sheet and I was amused to see that if we want to get rid of our old recycle bins, we cannot just put it in the new recycle bin for..well..recycling.   We would have to take it to a specific place at a specific time on a specific day to drop it off.  Sigh.  You know what?  I think I can probably find another use for it here at home instead.  Re purposing it instead of recycling it.  

I actually like the fact that this new recycle bin has a lidded top.  The old red open topped bins had bottles, cans and newspapers flying around town on a windy day.  And if it rained during the night, I bet those newspaper bins were hernia-heavy!  

So anyway that's what's new around here.  From now on, or at least until the rules change again, on garbage day in our city in front of all of our homes there will now be two nearly identical bins, one blue, one black, standing sentry, three carefully measured feet apart of course, waiting for the  truck with the snazzy fancy robot arm to come.  

It's still  the same garbage and recycle really.  Nothing new there.  Only the bin has been changed.  I keep wanting to follow that with, "to protect the innocent" but I will resist the urge)  I'm sure it will be just fine.

My life is so exciting ............

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