Plastic bags in rubbish have been identified as a pollution issue. They don’t break down in rubbish dumps – calculations were done to show how many rubbish bags are ‘rubbished’ every day- it’s more plastic rubbish bags than you can imagine!
Supermarkets in NZ encourage shoppers to bring their own bags to pack their shopping into - alternatively, you pay an extra 10 cents for a plastic shopping bag. These alternative plastic bags have been developed so that they break down faster than the traditional plastic bags and are not as strong as the old bags – in addition, you feel guilty if you don’t bring your own bags! There is a look that you get from the check out assistant…
Each house has two rubbish bins – one for ordinary waste, and the other larger one for any items which can be recycled – so all glass jars and bottles, all plastics, all card and paper goes into that recycle bin. And to make it even easier, a truck comes past your house each week to empty the bins. Our opcina is making recycling work.
There is money in rubbish – it is a good business to get into. I presume that the initial move to encourage us all to recycle was driven by business men with an eye on some profit, but we have all jumped on the rubbish truck, seeing the potential savings for the environment, not just the pocket. We are encouraged to buy the products with the least wasteful packaging. Going back to the brown paper bag days.
In addition, there are those obsessive types (like myself – I admit it) who compost. No food waste goes in my bins – it is all put into a container in my back yard.
When I mow the lawns, the cuttings are added to the mix, mother nature does her thing over time, turning the vegetation and the grass into a rich soil which I then dig into my vegetable garden. Taking it to the extreme.
At my office we are discussing buying a ‘worm farm,’ a simple self composting set-up for those living in apartments with no backyard. It is mess free – you add your food scraps to the top, and the worms living in the container work away eating their way through the scraps, doing what worms do (eating, shitting) – this creates a rich waste that can be used for terrace planters, complete with a liquid which gathers in the base of the container which is rich in nutrients as a plant additive. The idea is that we will plant our own lettuce and tomatoes on the terrace off our office, and then use the rich soil and nutrient produced by the worm farm to feed and enrich the plants – simple.
So imagine my consternation at having no choice in Makarska but to put my rubbish in a plastic bag and dump everything in the dumpster at the end of the road. I nearly had to have counseling! The guilt was incredible. The rubbish thing was an issue for me – I hated seeing so much rubbish lying on the beaches, so many plastic bags dumped at the rubbish bins. My friend Nino must have been driven crazy with me pointing it out all of the time.
It became a joke at rowing – crazy Allison reversing the boat to go back and pick up plastic bags and bottles floating in the sea. But the boys were into it – they got what I was trying to do.
Zagreb does the recycle thing in the streets – large dumpsters so that your rubbish can be sorted out. As I said, there is always money in rubbish, and it will take some enterprising person to work that out, and start Makarska doing what it should be doing anyway – if for nothing more, than to protect the beautiful environment that the tourists flock to see. It’s not that difficult – it just takes a mindset change, some incentive and some organization.
Just do some maths – each household in Makarska would probably put out at least one plastic bag of rubbish out each day, that’s 365 each house each year – and where does it go…. There’s your incentive.
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