On the 10th of August 2018, I was interviewed on the BBC radio as a recycling 'expert' (you can listen to the last ten minutes of the 3 hour programme on the link).
To prepare for this, I read and thought what could be the best piece of advice to give to people who are unsure of what to recycle from the waste of their households.
This, in the wake of recent claims from different organisations about the futile efforts of some recycling (saying that not everything that can be recycled becomes recycled), and of some local council proposals to reduce the number of times that waste is collected from households.
So I wanted to raise the issue of our relationship to waste. My reading took me to consider how waste has become something of value to many organisations, and how social enterprises help them to improve their recycling as well as the design of products to make them easier to recycle or to dispose.
After my reading, and also getting an email from my thoughtful friend Andy Hix, I started thinking like that as individuals, we often conceive of waste as something that becomes foreign to our homes, to our lives.
With a better and more inclusive view of waste, one in which we establish a kind of acceptance relationship with it, we could start thinking that it is not waste but ourselves with whom we would need to become better friends with. Friends that knowing the good and not so good about each other, work to make their relationship work.
For myself, in the last few years recycling has become a way of accepting that there are times when I feel anxious and in need of clearing out my mind. Managing waste allows me to get back to what is important for me, to spend time organising my thoughts and my lifestyle. When anxious, I do lot of recycling. When not, I let waste sit for a while, so that I also enjoy its company (bit weird I know, but then I can think of what to do for the benefit of both of us). Waste also allows me to have a conversation with my wife about future plans.
Recycling (which involves classifying waste, taking some of it to recycling centres, and making sure the waste bins are ready for collection) makes me feel in harmony with myself, my loved ones and the rest of the world around me.
Prior to and after the interview, I have started to become more interested in recycling information and have become a bit more aware of knowledge about it. It is interesting to see that many products from the supermarket have recycling information, and that this information suggests consulting further with local recycling centres about their capabilities to recycle different parts of products.
At the interview I was asked what could be recycled. I think I gave a couple of suggestions. I felt though that I couldn't get my views across too much. Maybe I was not the sort of expert they were expecting. Or maybe there was little time.
Anyway, I finished by saying that anything we can do to help a bigger recycling system in our society could help.t
For me, it is time to continue thinking if and improving my relationship with myself and waste through recycling.
What about you? Are you too busy to even taking the waste bins outside? That might signal you do not have a good relationship with yourself. Time to review it my friend :)
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