Lithuania is cleaning up....

Environmental consciousness is slowly arriving in Vilnius. On glass bottles you now have to pay a deposit, and there is talk of increasing the price of plastic shopping bags (though we always paid for them anyway).

Across the street from my house three new domed containers have appeared, in the play school style of design - a blue one with a rectangular slot for paper, a little green one with a round hole for glass of any colour, and a yellow one with a round hole for plastic. Not sure if these gadgets were made for Lithuania, or for a warmer country. It's easy to insert hard bottles into the bottle one; with the paper one where I insert cardboard as well it's not too difficult, but see the one that eats the plastic? The rubber around the hole is so hard (due to the cold?), and the plastic is usually so soft that you risk losing your hand in the process! (Minds dirtier than mine can insert their own comments here...).

Having lived in dirty countries all my adult life where you just chuck stuff in a bin, and watched with fascinated awe the way people in Germany sort their rubbish, I'm now also faced with making decisions when I chuck stuff away. Jayzus, now nothing in life comes without a management decision!

So there are the plastic milk-bags - easy. Is tetrapak plastic or paper? What about the plastic-lined paper that some of the bread comes in? I suppose I should start washing the yoghurt cartons the way Germans do, and folding juice cartons.....

But now the problem of storage arises - where do I store all this stuff? Already with every piece of paper, eg a teabag packet, I run to the waste paper basket under my desk.... In Germany I noticed that if you are a one-person household eating lots of vegetables, that leads to a lot of vegetable waste. In a heated kitchen. But far from enough to empty the bin daily or even every two days. In a heated kitchen. What happens to vegetable waste? In a heated kitchen? It composts all by itself. In a heated kitchen. Actually, it does not compost. In a heated kitchen. It rots. In a heated kitchen. It stinks!

So you need to take it out more often. What is the best way of taking out wet smelly rubbish? In a plastic bag.

Er, what was that about saving the environment?