Recycling? A message from the Site Crew!
'Rubbish', I suppose, is things that we don't want any more, or which are no use to us; stuff that we want to 'throw away'. Of course, being here on this one finite planet (and the nature of matter being what it is), it usually isn't possible really to throw anything away; generally all we really do is just move it somewhere else. The existence of landfill sites, and the poisons that sometimes seep from them, remind us of this. The black opacity of your normal rubbish bag unfortunately tends to allow us easily to disregard our trash, and somehow makes it ok to put anything in it, just because we want to 'throw it away', and it disappears into the black bag.
In previous years, the PTA camp provided a skip for trash, which the happy campers quite quickly filled to overflowing with often smelly black bags. Last year, instead, the Sacred Arts Camp provided clear bags for recyclables (glass, metal and plastic are now all recyclable at the Bridport tip), buckets for compost, and wood for camp-fires. We also took the recyclables off to the council's collection point, carried the compost to the farmhouse compost heap, and I think someone even provided a workshop on how to light a fire! We did not provide any support for black trash bags or landfill. The experiment was very successful; the site was very clean at the end of camp, many people helped keep the whole thing working, and there was no stinking skip.
The habit of just dumping anything we don't want anymore in an all-purpose trash bag is quite easy to break, but does require a little conscious thought at first. Soon it becomes quite obvious and second-nature to put waste paper on the fire, vegetable peelings in the bucket, bottles and cans and so forth in the right bags. It does help if everybody understands what should go where, because the traditional habit of dumping stuff all together takes quite a lot of clearing up after. If your trash really doesn't fit any of the above categories, then the 'bottom line' of the message to campers is:
If you carried it onto the site, then please carry it off again!
Thank-you!