Good Citizens

As I?ve mentioned in previous posts, we make regular fun trips to the Punt Verd (recycling centre) with our interminable piles of rubbish (we are such good citizens, she said smugly).

Last time we went to the one on Collserola. It was raining on and off and the traffic was horrendous - I?m pretty sure what we gained in recycling, we lost in carbon emissions. But up on Collserola the air was cold and fresh - and hey! you can see mountains and pine trees and sky. And you get exercise, trudging from bin to bin (although you are welcome to emit even more greenhouse gas by crawling around the place in your car). What really amused me was all these workers (in pre-PC days, binmen) in their luminous emerald outfits... watching telly. There, amidst the overflowing bins of cables, and fluorescent tubes, and cassette tapes, and household sprays, at a sort of central workstation of wooden tables, they had got three old discarded TVs going, plugged into extension cables snaking from the office building, and they were standing around watching a chat show. I found this hilarious. Pity I didn?t have my camera. No, I haven?t yet got round to getting a phone that takes pics. I?m still not too proficient with the one that just makes calls and sends text messages. I should have followed the binmen?s example and fished a digital out of the trash. Here's the link to Ajuntament's page about recycling. And here's the recycling-made-fun blog with the video that was on TV3's commercial breaks every day for months on end. Lots of practical ideas here: the original YouTube style video shows a young people ingeniously making space in their tiny kitchen for containers for the different rubbish fractions. And here's the Generalitat's latest wheeze (also seen on TV3): now that we are all recycling and have our coloured bags in place, it's time to reduce waste. Most of this is common sense - but if common sense ruled, maybe we wouldn't have made such a mess of the Earth in the first place. Valerie is the co-author, with Theresa O?Shea, of In The Garlic: Your Informative, Fun Guide to Spain.