I did not understand the segregation of garbage. A few tricks made me stop bothering with them

After the entry into force of the obligatory waste segregation, most Poles clutched their heads. We started tearing hair out of it shortly after we got acquainted with the new price list and it turned out that throwing the juice carton into the mixed can cost us several dozen zlotys a month. Fortunately, before I completely bald, I developed several patents that allowed me not to go crazy.

Garbage segregation has been and is one of the common topics of conversation on Polish streets. It doesn’t surprise me at all. After years of total recycling, we started to segregate waste from, I write it without a trace of irony, admirable worthy of passion. It’s a bit like the driver’s driving cart, someone suddenly handed the keys to the brand new Mercedes and threatened: "Don’t scratch him."

The Pole was not used to segregation, and dozens of rules to remember fell on him practically overnight. What’s worse, some of them seem completely non-intuitive. When I first looked at the instructions on how to sort the garbage, I realized that I would face a harder crossing. A plastic toy is not plastic, a milk carton is not a paper, and a broken mirror does not qualify for the category: glass (neither is all).

5 colors, 5 fractions – a new segregation system. See how we will sort the garbage in the new year .
More at: https://t.co/qcoD3SNZHe @ molszew77
@ZielonaWwa pic.twitter.com/N6TN4rhVsP

– Warsaw (@warszawa) January 2, 2019

Severe penalties for lack of segregation

The initial reflex was probably quite natural – all you have to do is throw everything into a container with mixed waste, i.e. where all the rubbish goes from which nothing can be recovered in the recycling process. I imagined that I would spread my arms caught in the act and shout: "Lord, what to do. It can’t be done anymore! "

A moment later, sobriety came. Our country is flooded with plastic. Smoke from "accidental" garbage fires covers the square kilometers of our beautiful country, and I bother to sort out the leftovers from the fridge.

Well, maybe it wasn’t just that. Increasing fees for garbage collection are also doing their part, which means that the idea of ​​recycling is starting to speak not only to the hearts of ecologists, but also the portfolios of the most hardened ecosceptics.

Not to be groundless – in Warsaw, multi-family real estate has been paying PLN 65 for garbage disposal since March this year. The penalty for the lack of segregation that can be imposed on the cooperative is PLN 130 for each premises. And that the fines are not just statutory fiction, a cooperative in Biała Podlaska has already convinced itself, which for breaking the law got an account for almost 28 thousand. zł.

The EU says: segregate

Why exactly Polish cities suddenly became so eager to segregate waste? Everything is the result of EU legislation. Countries belonging to the Community must reach 50 percent in 2020 recycling level, and in 2035 – 65 percent

Earlier, the conscientious division of waste into fractions was also done by corporations, taking on the education of consumers. Carrefour Polska and Procter & Gamble carried out an action under which they distributed eco-bags for garbage. They were produced from recycled materials from production waste from P&G factories.

They collect trash from the oceans and turn them into bottles! https://t.co/AJXaVLS3re

– Bizblog.pl (@BizblogPl) June 22, 2020

Procter & Gamble also made its own commitments. The Sustainable Development Strategy 2030 ambition assumes that by 2030 the packaging of all products from the company’s portfolio are to be re-usable and contain min. 25% recycled material. Already today you can buy Head & Shoulders shampoo in bottles made of plastic collected from beaches, and no production waste goes to landfills from Polish P&G factories.

We can say that trash in our surroundings is like stains. We want them to disappear and the environment around us is not only clean, but also healthy and safe. That is why it is so important to jointly combine the activities of companies, NGOs and local communities to act for the environment that we have only one thing. As a company, we attach great importance to ensuring that the footprint that our activities and our products leave in the environment is as small as possible

– comments Małgorzata Mejer, Corporate Communications Manager at Procter & Gamble in Central Europe.

How to segregate – survival in a few steps

Initially, I was going to print the waste segregation manual and look at it whenever I was in doubt. And it worked. On a free weekend. During the week, reading the segregation regulations began to be burdensome. It took me a dozen or so minutes a day to do a simple task. As a typical millennials I was crazy, because my ability to focus on such trivialities oscillates somewhere between the concentration of goldfish and green lizard.

And at this point, applications came to the rescue. I entered the right search engine password and realized that with the help of Google assistant I could call "Mr. Garbage Man".

"OKAY. Google. Where can I throw away the milk carton, "I asked.

"Definitely a yellow bag. Metals and pure plastics, "answered a mechanical voice. Phew, I felt someone was saving my life.

Of course, you can be a fan of new technologies and applications that make life easier, but it would be much easier if I knew it before. Now elementary school students have the materials provided on a tray and learn about how to properly segregate garbage in biology or nature lessons in a useful way. That is why the Clean Earth program was created to raise awareness, teach and introduce the principles of proper segregation and care for the environment in everyday life. In a very practical and pleasant way. Because the sooner the better.

What to do with bags?

There is only one question left – how to put all these categories of garbage in one studio apartment. And here for the first time with baked goods on my face I started to browse blogs that are an amazing source of inspiration. One of the patents is, for example, mounting a drawer under the sink with several small compartments …

… which of course quickly ceased to be enough. That is why it is important to separate the places of garbage storage on a larger area. The first few days made me realize that most of the paper lands in my bin directly from the desk where I work every day. So I placed a separate paper container there. Shortly afterwards, I threw the glass container out from under the sink, assuming that glass bottles can, without major aesthetic damage, rest near the fridge.

And suddenly it turned out that segregating garbage is not much more troublesome for me than throwing all the waste into one container. And supposedly it was supposed to be so scary.

The material was created in cooperation with the Procter & Gamble brand

I did not understand the segregation of garbage. A few tricks made me stop bothering with them

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