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The cart, yesterday. Horse not pictured.
Bucharest’s authorities have once again put the cart before the horse with the appearance around the city of recycling bins, such as those pictured above, which appeared at the end of our street last week.
Now, the debate about recycling per se is one which rages elsewhere. What concerns us is that we think, once again, Bucharest’s authorities are getting ahead of themselves.
I mean, huge numbers of this city’s inhabitants don’t even know what bins are for. And you are asking them to stop and sort out their rubbish before putting into the bin? Do me a favour: first start a ‘put rubbish in bins’ campaign. When that bears a little fruit, and only then, will it be safe to move on to the recycling bit.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Those who care will sort their garbage. There will always be some morons who will throw potato peels into the paper recycling bin.Happens even in Scandinavia. Those who throw wrong stuff into wrong bin are usually the immigrants.
Oh, and the engineers didn’t want to tell Ceausescu the results and when he came in inspection they mixed the garbage with coal and wood so that Ceausescu would see they were capable of building the power plant
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Somewhere in the 70′s Ceusescu ordered the best engineers in the country to build a power plant that would use garbage in order to produce energy as he saw that existed in France.
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And all the engineers started drawing, building, testing etc… but no matter how they tried the outturn was negative, meaning there was more energy spent for burning the trash than the energy received from the burning process.
And they started to ask themselves “how the hell can the French have such a power plant bu we can’t?!”. And the answer was found in… garbage: the French garbage contained a big amount of plastic bags, wrapping, cardboard, etc… which through the process of burning could offer a positive outturn, unlike the Romanian trash that contained potato peeling, egg shells, apple stubs etc
The same thing is happening with this initiative, we try to copy the civilized countries but we miss the most important parts
This belongs to much wider a topic. People living in Bucharest should learn how to behave in society generally speaking (and that brings to one’s mind yesterday’s post). Then they should be told about the city, what living in a city implies; most people here have no urban approach at all, see the way they crowd instead of queue in subway stations, look at traffic or at those precarious gardens in front of many apartment buildings. And only then one could make people understand what recycling stands for, how this can be done, what blue or green stand. Because, otherwise, these bins will have the same fate like those supposedly recycling-friendly bins in railway stations: they exist because it is nice to say we recycle, but nobody puts paper in the paper part, the cleaning lady steals the individual plastic bags and everything gets mixed up directly in the bin which becomes filthy and useless for what it was designed and made.