Feels like we’re fighting a losing battle on waste
I AM not writing this letter for readers to think what an admirable family we are, but am writing it as a wail of lament.
We are very conscientious about recycling and not wasting anything if humanly possible.
I was brought up during the war so this comes as second nature to me and I have passed the addiction down to the next generation.
So, we don’t pay for a green wheelie bin, we compost food scraps, etc and use it on the garden – that’s no problem.
Silver foil – the pet shop then the Blue Cross shop used to take this and redeliver, I don’t know to where, but neither do this any more. We have a cardboard container full of it.
Plastic bottle tops – the primary school took these at one time but no longer. We have a bag full.
Plastic – this is a nightmare which is overwhelming us. We started filling lemonade bottles to the required weight, as they can be used as bricks for making furniture, and have 19 of them sitting on a shelf in the cellar.
This is time-consuming and hard work, ramming all the plastic into the bottles. Can anyone make use of them?
We have bought a paper shredder which also shreds hard plastic, a daily job, and have bags full of shredded plastic, with which we have been filling the bottles, but today threw most of them out into the bin. We also threw out large bags of soft plastic, all washed, not knowing what else to do with it.
Plastic pots – we have stopped buying some items that come in plastic pots as the council can’t recycle them. I rang West Berkshire Council to complain that they didn’t recycle pots and was told to throw them out into the bin. I have a cousin who lives in Harrow and, when he visited before lockdown, we sent him home with a black sack full of them as his council deals with them. Why not West Berkshire? Again, we had a clear-out today and have thrown them all into the bin.
We have tried, but are in despair at being unable to stop what feels like a torrent of plastic coming into the house from supermarket deliveries.
We have been to Hungerford market and, although it is better, we still found vegetables wrapped in plastic.
No doubt all this plastic will now be crushed and loaded on to a container and sent out to places like Malaysia to poison their population, or end up in the sea. We feel we are fighting a lonely and losing battle.
IRIS LLOYD
Bridge Street
Hungerford