Recycling! Recycling! Recycling

Recycling! It's become a new swear word in our house recently. Our local council have really gone to town with the disposing of plastics and other re-useable material and it really has opened my eyes as to how much recycling is thrown away. Almost everything in fact! The trouble is our kitchen can't cope with the amount of re-cycleable rubbish that is generated. No space. So there is always recycleable rubbish, which normally would be safely put away in the main kitchen swing bin, in plastic bags ready to be taken out. Here's us trying to keep a kitchen tidy and there's always plastic or cardboard or tins about! What we need is another swing bin just for the recycling, but we have nowhere to place it. Small kitchen. Now you might think I'm dead against the idea of recycling, I'm not. I actually think it's a good idea, but I think the practice of recycling so much different types of material is unworkable. Certainly in our house. For heaven's sake even plastic has been sub-caterized. All the local recycling areas, which are normally near the supermarkets, won't take black or hard plastic! That will have to go to our main recycling depot at Mochdre, as does the cardboard. So not only we have to recycle the usual tins, cans, glass and paper, which get collected every 2 weeks, we now have to find space for:
Ordinary plastic
Hard plastic,
Black plastic
Juice cartons
Cardboard/card
Metal
Wood
There are others but these materials we hardly deal with, such as stone.

This is a lot of work and I can help feeling that I'm doing the binman's job for him. Most of our rubbish is recycleable so in effect I'm carting my own rubbish to the designated loading off areas! For free! This leads me to the notion of who is benefiting from all this recycling? Someone, somewhere, must be making money out of it. It's less work for the binman, because their main duties down at the depot at Mochdre include directing the public to the proper places to dump their rubbish. The ones on the waggons seem to working really hard whenever I see them every other Friday. And of course the poor old gentleman who I saw the other day working his socks off preparing huge amounts of cardboard for a press of some sorts. He looked really stressed, seeing more and more people coming into his hut with loads more work for him. His attitude seemed pretty good considering these circumstances, to be honest. The rest were wandering around checking if people are going to the right skip. Now and then they would spot some individual misdeameanor and make sure the items were deposited in the right place. To see their worried faces when I had 2 different types of recycleable material (wood and plastic) and I went up to the plastic skip first, and I caught the guy's eyes as he looked to see if I was going to chuck the wood in there as well. I'm being unkind. I would probably be monitoring just as hard if I was in their position. I know it's good for the planet but it is, I believe, used to make products. So, therefore, it is really raw materials for the production of items for selling, presumably for profit, or why would companies bother making these items. So, we can be seen as unpaid manual workers, bringing our, sometimes paid for, old recycling material to be prepared for the production of goods which are going to end up on the shelves of many supermarkets all over the country, possibly abroad, and with a marked up price because it been made from recycleable material! I have become increasingly cynical in my old age and I can't help thinking that there is an angle involved here.
Rant over!