Garbage disposal

Monday, 11th of April 2016

Having been in London for over a week now, I still constantly find myself discovering new things and learning the living arrangements of this city. One thing that came to my attention recently was the disposal of garbage. This minimal action is rather necessary but at first was extremely confusing and it is just now that I am getting the hang of it. 

The first thing you should know is that here in London there are no typical garbage bins, not in the streets and not in every residencial area, like there is in Lisbon. When you walk through the streets you might see places where you can dispose small objects and mainly at the park you will see bins designated for dog waste only. Meanwhile, as I started to cook and clean the apartment and I also started to have many things I wanted to remove from my house but with not a garbage bin in plain sight, I was rather confused on how people were proceding with this.  

I started to search online, which when you really think about it can be a bit ridiculous but it was my only way of finding out. After many pages that lead to no help at all, I was able to finally find one with every detail I needed. It turns out that here they adopted a system of collecting waste weekly, which means that as London is divided by several zones and areas, each of them has a day of the week when a truck comes and takes out the bags out of the street. Yes, of the street. 

For example, in my street the garbage is collected on Tuesdays around 11h/12h, so the night before (after 18h) and even on early Tuesday mornings, you will be able to see the all street full of black garbage bags (residencial disposal) and transparent ones (for recycling). This way there is no trash in the middle of the streets, everything is quite clean and it makes people be responsible about how much they are disposing of.

There is even an app, My Waste, that allows you to set up your address so you can know when the collecting is going to be and it turns out is quite helpful.

From a girl who spends Monday nights putting the trash out,

Mariana Fidalgo