Recycling is not easy

To be able to follow up your electricity consumption, a dozen of households in the capital area have been able to get the meter readings real time by their home computers on the net and as the pilot project try out has turned out so well this is soon going to be reality for all Finnish homes in order to save electricity.

I am looking forward to be able to see in real time what turning off some home appliance will do to the electricity consumption, maybe this would spur even the offspring into doing something about their lights being turned on even when nobody’s in the room.

A lot of TV programs today in Finland are about the issues of how to become more environmentally conscientious. We are taught how to choose the clean form of electricity, how to shop making the proper choices, what produce are environmentally good, what produce have been manufactured in ways thinking of the environment and we are also made believe that recycling is good. Well it would be good if there were enough capacity to recycle all the household waste in an easy way sorting all your waste instead of just chucking it all in the dustbin, which seems to be the general way of treating your garbage.

Sorting your own metal scraps, paper, cardboard, glass, plastics and so fort is hard at present as there are no separate containers in each building, you always have to take the car to do the sorting somewhere centrally, like by the local supermarket.

How hard can it be to have more containers available for the households to do the sorting ourselves at every house?

At present there normally is just is the ordinary bin, one for composting materials, another for recycling of paper and a third one for cardboards. All glass bottles and jars, old batteries have to be taken else where and the hardly exist any recycling of plastic materials or metal from households today. And the left over medicines are to be taken to the pharmacists for extinction.

I am quite confident that in due time people will range their own waste, if provided with the proper facilities in for recycling and the municipalities can stop complaining about not having enough resources. Collecting the garbage several times per week, or maybe even keeping it in separate containers on the trucks could do the trick. As it is now the paper and the household garbage is collected on separate trucks.

I guess it might be time for all of us to begin to act in environmentally good ways on all areas of our life.