The Third Bin

They came on a Tuesday morning. Two men in high-visibility jackets and a clipboard. They walked the street very slowly, stopping outside each house, consulting the clipboard, looking at the two bins already there — the black one, the green one — and making notes with the seriousness of people solving a difficult problem.

Three weeks later, a letter arrived. I read it over the shoulder of the woman in number fourteen. The council, it said, was pleased to announce the introduction of a new food waste recycling scheme. Effective immediately, residents would receive a new bin. Brown. Seventeen litres. For food waste only. Please do not contaminate with general waste. Please do not contaminate with garden waste. Please do not contaminate with the wrong kind of food waste. A list followed. The list was two pages.

The bins arrived on a Friday. The street spent the weekend reading the lists.

I have lived in this street for eleven years and I have watched the bin situation with the detached interest of someone who has no bins and never will. When I arrived there were two. Black for rubbish, green for recycling. The green bin came with its own literature — a laminated card explaining what could and could not be recycled, which the family at number nine stuck to their fridge for approximately four months before it fell down behind the washing machine. They have been putting crisp packets in the recycling ever since. Nobody has noticed. Nobody has come.

The crisp packets are not the point. The point is the bins.

Because here is what I have observed from this oak over eleven years of watching humans interact with their bins:

The bin is not a solution. The bin is a feeling.

The bin makes people feel like they are doing something, at the exact moment when doing something would require them to do considerably more than stand in their kitchen deciding which bin something goes in.

The food waste bin appeared and within a fortnight, number fourteen was composting. She read about it on her phone while waiting for the new brown bin to arrive and decided she'd rather do it herself. She bought a compost bin from the garden centre and now the food waste goes in the garden and the brown bin sits at the side of the house getting gradually more optimistic every collection day, waiting.

Number seven has not worked out the difference between the brown bin and the green bin. He puts grass cuttings in the brown bin and eggshells in the green bin. He is wrong on both counts and has been wrong for four months. The truck comes anyway. The man who empties the bins has not once looked inside before emptying them. The system appears to operate on trust.

Number twelve puts everything in the black bin. She has three children under seven and cannot face the list. I understand this more than I understand most human decisions.

Here is what the council did not do when they introduced the third bin. They did not change what gets made. They did not change what gets bought. They did not change the seventeen layers of plastic around the cucumber at the supermarket four streets over, which goes into the wrong bin every single week at number nine along with the crisp packets, or into the right bin at number three where it sits on top of a banana peel in the seventeen-litre brown bin feeling extremely recyclable until it isn't, because it's plastic, and no bin fixes plastic.

They introduced a bin.

I want to be fair to the bin. The bin is doing its best. The bin did not design the cucumber packaging. The bin did not lobby against deposit return schemes or extended producer responsibility legislation. The bin arrived on a Friday and asked only to be filled correctly, and most of the street is trying, in the way that most people try at things that have been made more complicated than they need to be.

But I have watched three generations of humans in this street and what I have noticed is this:

The moment a bin arrives, the feeling of having solved something arrives with it.

The problem becomes the bin. Is the bin full? Is the bin in the right place? Is the bin the right colour? Is the thing I'm holding bin-appropriate?

The bin becomes the entire question, and the question of why the thing exists at all — why there is so much of it, who made it, who decided it should be made this way — that question goes in the black bin.

Number fourteen's compost heap is doing well. She showed it to number fifteen last week. Number fifteen seemed interested.

The brown bin continues to wait.