We have had a lot of rain and large puddles have grown. On a rainy night, this is what the Market Car Park, in the town centre looked like . The car park is used by season ticket holders – mostly traders.
It also houses an area for waste / recycling. The cages are a recent innovation.
By morning the clouds have gone but standing water still remains. On Ferry Walk, just off Wilsham Road, such standing water is an obstacle for the elderly people who live there.
Some of the streets in Abingdon got their first waste collection under the new regime on Thursday. Thanks to Our Man in Lettings for this picture of his street afterwards.Here in East / West St Helen Street we got our first this Friday morning .
There are three bins: small green for food, large green for recyclable, and black for non-recyclable. The food waste was straight forward. The rest needed thinking about. The only thing we had definitely non-recyclable was polystyrene and crisp packets. Containers and cardboard and paper were definitely recyclable. But that left a grey area between.
Quite a few of our neighbours have exchanged the wheelie bins they were first given for sacks . The delivery company did not get it right in quite a few cases. Pink sacks are non-recyclable. But I notice quite a few put out green sacks instead (recyclable) and they have not been collected.
Not everybody has even realised there has been a regime change. On Lombard Street, some people put out their black bags on Tuesday and their old green boxes on Thursday. These have now got a yellow label with the heading “Verdant – South Oxfordshire District Council – We do not collect household waste from black bags.…”
According to the Trash Disposal Timeline it was in, or around, AD 200 that the Romans set up the first refuse collection service – two men would walk along the street collecting rubbish and throwing it in a wagon.
That has culminated in the current age of over packaging where black bags containing everything from the remains of the Sunday lunch to polystyrene and crisp wrappers and grease from the chip pan are mixed together, and put out under cover of darkness in a black bag for collection some time the next day.
We mark the passing of an age with this picture of black bags on West St Helen Street … This will be the final time they are collected in this way.
Wheelie bins are the future.
It was all change, when we got home today. Two wheelie bins stood outside our door.
Our garden is not very big, and space is at a premium, but we took them in.
The leaflet said we could put our old – non-wheelie bin – out to be recycled so that will save some space. But we do now have three wheelie bins. The two new ones are green (recycling) and grey (other). The older one is brown and seems less useful now. We used to use it for cardboard and garden cuttings, but now cardboard must be put in the green one the brown one will not get a lot of use, and be rarely put out. So I’m not sure it can justify itself anymore.