A trip to the tip

When I was a kid, rubbish at Lord Howe was burnt or buried.  For the last 10 years, Lord Howe has had a state-of-the-art Vertical Compost Unit (VCU) which processes all of our organic waste including meat, dairy products, food scraps, green waste, cardboard, paper and sewage sludge.  The garbage has to be sorted very thoroughly – it’s one of the hardest things for guests and new staff to get used to.  Recyclable rubbish and some garbage (including nappies) are returned to the mainland on the ship every fortnight.  A visit to the tip is part of every Lord Howe bus tour. 

Over the last 10 years, the proportion of rubbish that is composted has increased – that’s the good news.  The bad news is that Lord Howe now produces much more non-recyclable rubbish than we did 10 years ago.  The reason is simple – like everyone else we now have more consumer goods and replace them more often.  We throw out our DVD players, TVs, computers and washing machines and none of these things can be recycled.  The old island tradition of saving everything in case it can be used again is dying out. 

There’s no garbage collection at Lord Howe and I spend a lot of time at the tip these days.  It should be a quick trip, but this morning it took me almost an hour.  It was raining.  I took three bins down the steps to the car (food scraps, plastics, paper and cardboard) then a box of recyclable bottles and cans and a bucket of nappies.  I came back into the house and took Elsie down to the car and put her into her car seat and then made another trip for Pixie in her capsule.  I had to run back into the house for a dummy for Pixie.  When I got back to the car, Pixie was screaming and the dummy wasn’t helping – she needed a feed.  I took her out of the car and back into the house and then made another trip for Elsie.  By the time I got Elsie out of her seat and back into the house, Pixie had gone back to sleep and I had to start all over again…