Class conscious - Andrew Martin spots class differences at the recycling centre
Published 23 February 2004
Recycling San Pellegrino plastic bottles is middle class. Recycling Lilt cans isn't
There's a Guardian questionnaire which asks: "What is your favourite journey?" I think that mine is from my house to my local recycling centre in north London. If I've had a difficult Saturday morning with the boys, the wife will say: "You go off to the centre, Andrew, I'll take over now." She knows I find it relaxing to lob a stack of newspapers into the back of the car (or alternatively one edition of the Sunday Times), together with a bin liner full of organic material, and drive off.
One's fellow recyclers at the centre are very nice and middle class. As they unload their cars, it's always Radio 4 that seeps out; the green crate designated for plastic bottles is full of empty San Pellegrino mineral water bottles, rather than, say, Lilt cans, and I've never seen a single tabloid in the huge newspaper skip. There's an orderly queue at each of the mighty containers into which you deposit material while standing on steel gantries; and people always help each other out, responding readily to such trilled queries as: "You don't happen to know where I put yoghurt pots, do you?" Yes, there's a special bin at our centre for yoghurt pots, and the place features new refinements almost every week, such as special repositories for old mobile phones, spectacles, batteries . . .
Occasionally, a huge, sinister-looking white van drives up at the centre and we all get a bit tense. It'll be loaded with chunks of automobiles, or the fixtures and fittings of almost an entire gutted house, and it is perfectly obvious that the men in the cab are not thinking primarily of environmental sustainability. "They're not here to recycle," we regular customers are all thinking. "They're here to dump." So it's always very satisfying to see the staff at Regis Road order any such vehicle to leave immediately, with a sharp reminder that the centre is not for commercial use.
The staff at the centre are very pleasant. They always shout "Excuse me!" very clearly as they drive about in the huge earth-movers they use for compressing the stuff in the skips, giving you every opportunity to get out of the way. Once, when I was upending a bag of what I honestly believed to be "organic material" into the appropriate skip I noticed, too late, that there were also a few old rusty gardening implements in the bottom. One of the staff was looking on as this accident occurred. "They'll rot down eventually, won't they?" I asked, as we looked at a pair of metal hoe ends nestling on the leaf mulch. I didn't quite catch the man's response, but it was basically friendly, I think.
I'm not sure about some of the signs the staff put up, though. One states that a single gallon of oil can cover a surface area of water the size of two football pitches, which is very interesting . . . But is this a good thing or a bad thing? Another states that a million cans are used in Camden every week, adding that this is enough metal to build 50 cars, to which I would respond that I'm not sure I want to hand over my week's load of baked bean cans if this will enable the construction of more cars. Even at my entry-level environmentalism, this seems not quite right.
These are minor quibbles, however, and I always leave the centre happy at having done my bit for the planet, and at having unburdened myself of clutter. In fact, the pleasure of getting rid of stuff at the centre is rivalled only by the pleasure of acquiring stuff at the centre. As I write, I'm looking at this week's haul from the table on which items no longer wanted by a particular household, but potentially useful to others, are placed: one Bosch hedge trimmer, one pair of garden shears, one Thorens TD 160 record-player turntable.
Sometimes, I admit, I return with more goods than I deposited at the centre, but not often. The environment wins on balance, of that I'm pretty certain.
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