Wednesday Ritual

There’s a wonderful ritual that takes place every Wednesday starting at around 0530. In the distance, the sound of a few dogs barking, the noise getting closer as more and more dogs join in the chorus. And soon, our dogs have also added their ‘voices’ to the cachophony of sound!

Yes its Wednesday rubbish/ trash/ garbage bin collection day. Well before Cape Town refuge collection services can get to our bin, we have the motley crew of people pushing supermarket trolleys and makeshift trolleys and even old prams scouring the route of the ‘official’ garbage collectors. Their job - to get there first!

Cape Town is quite innovative in South African terms for their environmental/ recycling policy. Last year during the power crisis (is the crisis over?) the council, working with Eskom, started offerering replacement low energy light bulbs/ globes for free. This year the council has decided to start a door to door recycling scheme and has distributed bags for residents to separate recyclable from non-recyclable waste. While this is certainly not on the scale of recycling in the UK (which itself is a long way behind the rest of Europe) its an excellent start, although we only received one batch of recycling bags.

We have always recycled waste - its the right thing to do! And now, we can help those unofficial collectors of other peoples junk, by compartmentalising our rubbish! I’m proud of my personal ability to be able to keep the supply of empty beer and wine bottles on the go - these must be the equivalent of garbage gold dust!

I hope that statistics don’t show that Cape Town’s recycling hasn’t worked. I’m sure it has - it will have enabled more people to transform more junk into more novelty craft items, much of which will be exported.