A Waste of Space

Grundon is a national waste management company we pay to take away our general waste and recycled materials. This last week there was a little waste left in my waste bin that this general waste company refused to take. Why? Because there was a bucket full of beautiful curly wood shavings in the bin.

Now in general waste there can be anything that cannot generally be recycled, everything from rags and broken bricks to non recyclable plastic containers, styrofoam, bubblewrap or whatever. Now some of you might recall the lengthy efforts I went to to make wooden bins to replace the ugly plastic ones I had currently been using in an effort to improve my footprint on the earth. I then found a maker of cotton bags to which I added brass rings and draw strings for dry shavings that fit inside the bin and so on.

It works wonderfully. Well, this week this yellow tag was fastened to my wheelie bin.

"Contaminated"! the tag said...it went on to say that it was contaminated with sawdust which was not the case at all. The wood shavings were directly from my hand planes. There was no dust per se but there would be sawn chips from my handsaws but not actual dust. So I asked myself just what do I pay them £60 a month to take away if wood shavings are not acceptable but all of the other world-contaminating stuff is OK?