Relaxing and Recycling

 We have been back at work for about a week now. It's another year, and with it comes a new set of challenges. The results may be good, bad, or result in things staying the same for the immediate future. It's a stressful game nowadays, and long gone are the heady days of every moment being easy and peaceful. Now, one has to actively seek ways to calm the mind and spirit. For me, this will mean art school to pursue my drawing that has been left on the back burner. Archery is also in the pipeline, now that I have a bow, and some guitar lessons with a tutor accompanied by my grandson who is also about to learn. The motorbike is now fully rehabilitated, and she is going to provide many a soul freeing ride. Amsterdam and The Hague beckon this year as a long ride. Later, we return with the family to St.Davids. The year is going to be a rollercoaster of a ride, but we like a challenge.

The state of the world bothers me. There is greed, conflict and destruction happening globally, and I fear that we have now passed the point of no return. The natural world is of huge importance mostly, as without it nothing else matters, and we try to do our bit to help. Amongst other stuff, we try to reduce our own consumption of plastic by purchasing thing's that come in as little, or no packaging wherever possible, even if it means spending more to do so. Our household waste is carefully recycled wherever possible, with the vegetable waste being through onto the garden borders as soon as it is made, and then hoed in to add to the quality of the soil. 

Every piece of unwanted paper that we have in the house is shredded, and this is then taken to one of the properties that we look after, where a resident is a fastidious composter, and welcomes our large bags of paper waste to mix with leaf mould and grass clippings that we produce throughout the year. The resulting compost is then spread on to the garden borders.

We produce about three hundred tons of garden rubbish a year, and this, by law, now has to be taken to a recycling centre based near Bournemouth International airport....thankfully. It's a very expensive part of our business, in fact the single biggest expense, but once deposited, along with the entire garden waste from every other garden trader, tree surgeon and household in Dorset and Hampshire, what amounts to hundreds of thousands of tons annually, it is formed into huge piles, turned and temperature regulated, sifted and shredded, until it comes out the other end as a re-saleable compost. Tree surgeons wood is chipped and sold on, and they now even handle food waste, which is processed using anaerobic digestion for heating

Our little contribution always seems so small, but along with hundreds of others it makes quite a large amount of rubbish.Do any of you recycle, and if so, how, and with what? I am always looking for ways to improve our own methods.

To end, can I just say how sad it was to hear of the death of Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries.