Good Friday

Good Friday or no, every Friday is garbage collection day in Gembrook. The truck roars/groans/growls/squeals/bangs its way up our street at about 6.30 am. It works Launching Place Rd. and Quinn Rd. earlier still, you can hear it in bed before dawn. The noise seems horribly amplified in the cool, still, early morning air, as if whoever designed the vehicle was hellbent on as much noise as possible. The sequence repeats over and over as the truck accelerates, brakes, lifts bins with the hydraulic arm, bangs them once or twice, puts them down, and moves on to the next property. It's repeated a couple of hours later every second week, when a truck returns to pick up the bigger yellow lidded recycling bins. The council, with much enthusiasm, recently introduced a green waste bin collection for the other alternate week, however I, and many people, have declined this optional service, choosing instead to mulch with, or compost garden waste.
The bins are designed to reduce rat and dog invasion and to minimize human labour, but it's not foolproof and there's always litter left on the road on my way up the spur. The empty bins often fall over, replaced in haste by the operator, and the impression is of untidiness and sometimes mayhem. Not uncommonly, if a dog looking for food, or a person, in belligerance, has knocked a bin over, the truck ignores it and moves to the next house.
The odd bits of litter that spill from bins in the tranfer from bin to truck, I pick up and put back in the empty bin. If a dog has tipped up a whole bin and spread a lot of stinky, gooey trash over an area I leave it for the householder. On my everyday walk I put aluminium cans in a bag for Jod, who sells them to a recycler, and I put plastic and paper in the recycling bin at Puffing Billy station or the News agent/post office. I don't put plastic and paper in the street bins as this all goes to landfill. I asked the council worker who regularly empties the street bins into a small truck if there's a recycling procedure for this rubbish and he said there wasn't. Seems odd to me, that the council makes a big fuss about recycling, but don't have street bins for recyclables. The same at the shopping mall food halls, there's no recycling bins usually.
I think of the energy and resources used in the manufacture of cans and plastic bottles and hate the thought of them going to landfill. Preventing a little of that pleases me that I've had a positive impact in a small way, every day. There's a long way to go in the community though, because often I see a tipped over bin on my walk there's plastic bottles and cans mixed in with the the other stuff. Similarly as I walk past recycling bins stuffed so full the lid is sticking up I see plasic bags and foodscraps stuffed in with the recyclables. Either those people don't know, don't care, or don't think.
The Indian Mina birds are happy on Fridays, busy on the road, scavenging around bins. And 'Snow' is always alert looking for Friday titbits.