THE AGE OF THE AWARE

One of the prob­lems with liv­ing in a mod­ern so­ci­ety is that you need to be aware of every­thing. We are bom­barded with aware­ness cam­paigns of all sorts, telling us that we have to be more aware of global warm­ing, more aware of in­equal­ity, of racism, of the time spent look­ing at screens, of road safety, of our sugar in­take, of our power con­sump­tion, of so many things I find it all quite ex­haust­ing. I some­times look back at the old days fondly, when we lived much less stress­ful lives in the bliss of ig­no­rance.

In our vil­lage, a new sys­tem of rub­bish col­lec­tion was re­cently in­tro­duced, the door-to-door sys­tem that is be­com­ing in­creas­ingly com­mon, par­tic­u­larly in vil­lages and small towns. The door-to-door col­lec­tion sys­tem re­quires each house­hold to sep­a­rate its rub­bish into dif­fer­ent con­tain­ers, which are left out­side the house on set days to be picked up and, we can only hope, taken to be re­cy­cled. Ac­cord­ing to gov­ern­ment data, the door-to-door sys­tem is al­most twice as ef­fi­cient as the tra­di­tional sys­tem of dump­ing your rub­bish bags in large com­mu­nal con­tain­ers at the end of the street.

Mind you, it’s also a lot more work for the av­er­age cit­i­zen. We now have a se­ries of con­tain­ers to man­age, each need­ing its own type of bag, all colour coded so that even stu­pid peo­ple like us can un­der­stand, along with a timetable (also colour coded) telling us when we can and can­not put out our or­ganic, glass, plas­tic or paper rub­bish. Any other type of rub­bish goes in the grey con­tainer for gen­eral refuse, which only gets col­lected oc­ca­sion­ally.

A prob­lem I no­ticed last month, when I was stand­ing in the garage sur­rounded by bulging plas­tic bags, is that there is nowhere for old clothes. As a fam­ily, we had taken ad­van­tage of chang­ing out our sum­mer wardrobe for our win­ter clothes to col­lect to­gether all our old items that were no longer wanted. Now I had the prob­lem of what to do with them, and there was no way they were going to all fit in the tiny grey refuse con­tainer.

I loaded the bags into the car and drove into the local town to put them in the large or­ange con­tain­ers pro­vided for old clothes and fab­rics. I got there and found the con­tainer was over­flow­ing and in fact was sur­rounded by bags of clothes, many of which had opened and spilled their con­tents all over the pave­ment.

I de­cided to drive (all the time aware of my petrol con­sump­tion) to the next town, where I re­mem­bered hav­ing seen an­other or­ange con­tainer. When I got there, how­ever, the con­tainer was gone. A local in­formed me that there had been prob­lems with gangs emp­ty­ing the con­tainer of the clothes to sell and make money from them so the local coun­cil had de­cided to re­move the con­tainer. In the end, after the bags spent a few days in the car boot, I fi­nally got rid of them by tak­ing them to the local dump where I found an­other or­ange con­tainer.

The ex­pe­ri­ence left me dis­sat­is­fied. The or­ganic rub­bish col­lec­tion, for ex­am­ple, worked like clock­work but what the hell was going on with the clothes re­cy­cling issue? I was for­tu­nate to find that the El Punt Avui news­pa­per had just pub­lished a re­port on this very topic (Tues­day Jan­u­ary 23). You can read it for your­self if you’re in­ter­ested, and it ex­plains very well what the sit­u­a­tion is, how only 10% of clothes in Cat­alo­nia are re­cy­cled and that the other 90% ends up in land­fills or in­cin­er­a­tors. This ob­vi­ously won’t do in today’s world and so steps are afoot to rec­tify the sit­u­a­tion , be­gin­ning with - yes, you guessed it - a se­ries of aware­ness cam­paigns!

Opin­ion