Balderdasha's 2021 litter picking thread

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

At risk of lowering the tone, maybe they were knocking one out? Using a wank sock would have preserved their modesty and kept their lad warm at the same time.

"At the risk of lowering the tone"?

[Balderdasha]

Picked just one carrier bag of rubbish today. I noticed on the walk home a few days ago that one of the hedges opposite our house was full of coffee cups and cans and bottles so I cleared that out on the way to taking the kids to the park to play frisbee at lunch time. Other unusual finds: part of a red bike light, a chewed tennis ball in the sandpit (presumably lost by a dog owner), all the cardboard packaging from a Capri sun pack.

Total litter picking expeditions to date: 3
Total bags of rubbish collected to date: 5

[Patrick Thistle]

Thinking about the weighing of rubbish, could you weigh, say 20 bags at random, then use the average to calculate a weight for the total bags collected over a year? So if the lightest in your sample was 1kg and the heaviest was 3 kg and you collected 50 bags of rubbish, you could say you've collected between 50kg and 150kg of rubbish, or an estimated 100kg.

Another way of measuring would be by volume. A bag full of plastic wrappers is probably the same weight as one glass bottle but takes up a lot more volume. You'd need to calculate the volume of the bag you use.

[elguapo4]

A couple of questions. Balders, what do you do with the rubbish that you collect, do you put it in your domestic bin? I'm full of admiration for your efforts, but you shouldn't be paying for other people's lack of consideration.

Also, is there any equivalent in the UK to the Tidy Towns competition? This has been going in Ireland for 60 years, and is taken very seriously by the competing towns. Even my dreary Dublin suburb has a commitee.

[Balderdasha]

A couple of questions. Balders, what do you do with the rubbish that you collect, do you put it in your domestic bin? I'm full of admiration for your efforts, but you shouldn't be paying for other people's lack of consideration.

The park is full of bins, which always have space in them, so I just tie the bag of rubbish up and drop it in the nearest bin. They get collected regularly by the park rangers.

There would never be room for it in our household bin. We accidentally missed the general waste collection the week before Christmas, and then the collection after Christmas was delayed due to all the bank holidays. By the time it got collected, I had eight extra refuse bags which wouldn't fit in our main bin, so I walked up and down our street the night before the bin lorries came and put one extra bag in each neighbour's bin.

I'm curious about this concept of "paying extra for more rubbish" though. Do they weigh your bins or something? We pay a flat council tax fee which covers all rubbish collections. There's a general waste collection every fortnight, a recycling collection every other fortnight and a separate food waste collection every week. With the general waste and food waste collections, they will only collect what fits in the standard sized bins (wheelie bin for general waste, much smaller brown bin for food waste). With the recycling collection, they will collect as much as you want them to. Anything that doesn't fit in the standard where bin can be put next to it in see-through carrier bags so the teams can see that it's mixed dry recycling (it all goes together, glass, cans, cardboard, etc). I also pay ?40 a year for weekly garden waste collection but mostly only use that in the summer months.

I don't even know how I could pay for extra bin collections even if I wanted to.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Also, is there any equivalent in the UK to the Tidy Towns competition? This has been going in Ireland for 60 years, and is taken very seriously by the competing towns. Even my dreary Dublin suburb has a commitee.

England being England, we had a load of Tory bellends exhorting us to "Clean up for the Queen" a couple of years ago. Which could (and can) fuck right off, natch.

[elguapo4]

The collection rate is similar over here, but your general waste is charged by weight and by how often you put out your bin. So if you put out a quarter full bin every two weeks you'd be charged more. I only put my main bin out once a month, sometimes 6 weeks. One of the advantages of being single with no children.

[Balderdasha]

In terms of Tidy Towns, there probably is something similar but I don't know. Before Covid-19, there was an organisation that did community litter picks in the parks every few months, and I know there's a "Friends of X Park" group who litter pick together on Sundays. I can't be bothered with all the extra organisation though. I just take a carrier bag and a litter picker with me every time I go out.

[S. aureus]

My contribution to the exciting world of rubbish collection. Here in San Mateo we have a green (anything compostable), a blue (anything recyclable) and a black (everything else) bin. They are all collected weekly. We can pay more for larger bins if we are routinely over-filling, which has not been close to a problem. The recycling gets closest, but here we can put stuff beside the bin (eg more cardboard) if necessary and they'll take it too. We can schedule additional pick-ups for large items, but I forget the rules and costs on that (possibly twice a year at no charge).

[Lang Spoon]

A couple of questions. Balders, what do you do with the rubbish that you collect, do you put it in your domestic bin? I'm full of admiration for your efforts, but you shouldn't be paying for other people's lack of consideration.

Also, is there any equivalent in the UK to the Tidy Towns competition? This has been going in Ireland for 60 years, and is taken very seriously by the competing towns. Even my dreary Dublin suburb has a commitee.

I'm convinced Skerries only won that a few years back due to backhanders, or they shot all the fuckin dogs that summer. The seafront, every patch of grass, absolutely crawling with dogshit. The dogs might be less scary restricted breeds than in Balbriggan but the half posh fuckers are just as bad at picking up after their precious mutts.

[Incandenza]

My contribution to the exciting world of rubbish collection. Here in San Mateo we have a green (anything compostable), a blue (anything recyclable) and a black (everything else) bin. They are all collected weekly. We can pay more for larger bins if we are routinely over-filling, which has not been close to a problem. The recycling gets closest, but here we can put stuff beside the bin (eg more cardboard) if necessary and they'll take it too. We can schedule additional pick-ups for large items, but I forget the rules and costs on that (possibly twice a year at no charge).

That bit about leaving out extra recycling is nice. Nothing like that here for us. And some jerk filled up our garden/composting can and our recycling can with their garbage a few weeks back, as well as others in our alley. Right before Christmas, when our recycling can is filled to the max all the time.

Fortunately the small airport near our house has a lot of dumpsters that are out and open, so I often make use of those when we have too much to fit in our can or a really large cardboard box (bought a headboard for a bed recently, for example). I figure that it's public property, the dumpsters are owned by the city, and I'm a city resident, so it's fine for me to make use of those city resources. I still remove all shipping labels with our name and address on them, though!

[Balderdasha]

Just a quick 20 minute trip to the park today between calls. Kids just went on the big swing (I really hope that the council doesn't take it away like in the first lockdown), I picked one bag of rubbish. Usual contenders of sandwich packaging, cans, sweet wrappers, and one forlorn red bauble. Also an abandoned pair of gloves on a bench but I'll leave them for a day or two to see if anyone comes back for them.

Total litter picking expeditions to date: 4
Total bags of rubbish collected to date: 6

[Balderdasha]

Took a carrier bag and the litter picker with me on a quick trip to the local shop. Wasn't expecting to collect much as it was already dark and I didn't think I'd be able to see much, but I easily filled that bag and could have filled another. There's a layby near the shop where car drivers seem to buy stuff from the shop, consume it immediately and then drop the resultant rubbish straight out the car window. Often I find empty 4 pint cartons of milk. Do people really buy this much milk and down it in one go? This does annoy me a bit as it's right next to the river where there are ducks and my friend the little egret. But at least it feels like there's a purpose to clearing the rubbish, in terms of making it a nicer environment for the birds. I also hope that if I clear it enough maybe it'll discourage people from dropping their rubbish, that whole "broken window" theory. Strangest find today was one of my daughter's plastic neon arrows that she must have shot over the back fence while we were putting the trampoline together yesterday and failed to mention.


Total litter picking expeditions to date: 5
Total bags of rubbish collected to date: 7

[Balderdasha]

Took the kids out to the park for an hour yesterday and took my litter picker and a carrier bag with me. Went up to the skate ramp which is a fairly reliable source of sweet wrappers and drinks bottles. It was pretty windy which meant I had to chase a few bits of rubbish several times as I'd put them in the carrier bag and then they'd fly straight out again. Strangest find was a pale blue glasses cleaning cloth. Annoyingly we lost our frisbee. Scoured a large area of the park for ten minutes but no sign of it. Might find it on a future expedition.

Total litter picking expeditions to date: 6
Total bags of rubbish collected to date: 8

[Balderdasha]

Litter picked the sandpit in the park today. Since yesterday someone had stuffed a KFC drink cup and a coke can inside the hedge on my front lawn. Found a chip fork, a little metal yellow car that I might have rescued if it wasn't so completely drenched in wet sand, and a penny.

Total litter picking expeditions to date: 7
Total bags of rubbish collected to date: 9
Money found to date: ?1.01

[scratchmonkey]

This seems to be the right thread to note the odd stuff that I see when I'm walking the dog -- we live fairly close to several major thoroughfares with a wide spectrum of people using them, so there's quite a varied amount of litter, especially because we are two blocks from an establishment that sells "adult" items -- while it is currently named "Secrets", it used to have the far more amusing name of "An Adult Variety Store". Anyway, things I've seen on the ground lately:

• An assortment of bones, which the dog will invariably find first and I'll have to pry out of his mouth
• a plain-white full-face plastic costume face mask
• Hair extensions
• The packaging for a rubber 8-inch dildo
• Wrapper for Magic: The Gathering cards
• A small glass bottle one-third full of neon orange liquid, with a cap labeled "Liquid Orgasm"
• A dead rat (see first entry)

[Patrick Thistle]

I once picked up a Match Attax card of a Manchester City player, and posted it on Twitter saying "I found Jesus!"

[Balderdasha]

Cold, wet and muddy outside. Took the kids for a walk around the whole park to try and find the lost frisbee, with no luck. Picked another bag of litter, mostly cans and bottles out of the greenery near the river. Collected about 50 cigarette butts from near one bench. Someone having some sort of chain smoking meltdown. Unusual finds: a pink gin can, a bottle cork, another penny.

Total litter picking expeditions to date: 8
Total bags of rubbish collected to date: 10
Money found to date: GBP 1.02

[Patrick Thistle]

This is practically paying for itself.

[treibeis]

You litter-pickers ought to come here. There's a deposit system, which is quite complicated. Empry bottles and cans, depending on what they contained, are worth between 0 and 25 cents.

One of my employees - middle-class, me - is a vessel-collector. He averages about 300 euros a month, tax-free, from it. When The Rolling Stones were here, he made 500 euros in one day.

The result: Less crap on the streets, more stuff gets recycled, people on their uppers get a bit more money. It's a good system.

(All right, everybody who buys or sells certain bottles ultimately pays that much more for them because of the system. Which, for middle-class, cleaner-employing fucking bastards, is tantamount to crucifixion, even when it isn't.)

[Sporting]

There's a deposit system, which is quite complicated. Empry bottles and cans, depending on what they contained, are worth between 0 and 25 cents.

One of my employees - middle-class, me - is a vessel-collector. He averages about 300 euros a month, tax-free, from it. When The Rolling Stones were here, he made 500 euros in one day

Don't bottles bought from, say, Lidl, have to be redeemed there, and nowhere else? Or am I misremembering things?

[ursus arctos]

Certainly not the case in Hesse when we were there

For one thing, there is no way of determining where a given bottle was sold

[Sporting]

I shall ask later and report back.

[ursus arctos]

I'm wondering if there is a particular Swabian rule or mentality in play here.

[Sporting]

"Introduced by Germany’s Social Democrat/Green coalition government in 2003, Germany’s Pfand (deposit) system has had a overwhelmingly positive effect on littering and introduced fun technology, but has also come with some unexpected social side-effects.

Pfand is an additional deposit you pay as part of the price of a bottle or can, and which gets reimbursed to you when you return the container to a vendor.

Almost all German supermarkets have sophisticated “reverse vending machines” that will weigh and scan your bottle to match against a list of acceptable shapes and sizes.

If your bottle is not on the retailer’s list, the machine spits the container back at you. If it matches, the bottle goes down a chute for either recycling or shredding, and the machine hands you a voucher with the added-up Pfand that you can then cash in at the till."