Tales of the Village - After the Storm.

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On the village Facebook page today, somebody commented that the village looks like the opening scenes of '28 Days Later'. If you've seen the film, you'll recognise the reference to an empty landscape with rubbish blowing around. Yesterday we got the tail end of 'Big Storm Frank' and sadly it hit on a day when all the recyclables were out in their tubs for collection. The wind picked up everybody's carefully separated plastics, papers, tins and bottles and generously redistributed them around the village. During my 'dodging the rain' walk yesterday afternoon, I thought I'd never seen the place look so terrible. When my husband gets home this afternoon, we'll grab some bin bags and go and see if we can fill a couple. There's no way we can leave the village looking so terrible. Of course then there's the problem of how to get rid of what we collect and that also ties into some other comments on the Facebook page. Our district council was a pioneer in recycling and invented an easy to use scheme for recycling - one that didn't involve needing a PhD in materials separation. The scheme became a national benchmark but over the years other districts both caught up and overtook ours. There are calls for 'blue bins' - wheelie bins for just the recylables that would have proper lids and wheels instead of the current plastic tubs which have no tops and get blown around. I have mixed feelings about the proposal. On the one hand, it would keep the village tidier and encourage more recycling. On the other, not everybody has the space for yet another wheelie bin. We have the grey one for standard waste, the brown one for compostables (actually we have TWO of those but we're not supposed to) and a tiny brown one for food waste which we don't use because our food waste is mostly compostable because we don't eat meat. We have a large garden but not every home can manage the bins already supplied and one more might be a step too far.