Chapel Hill and Mont Boron - Part I - Recycling

Mont Boron, France - I just made a note to myself to remember to put out the recycling on Wednesday. If I were back in Chapel Hill, I'd be doing the same, but where we live, a reminder to put out the blue boxes on Tuesday.

Here on Mont Boron, a hill that makes up the southeastern corner of the city of Nice, we are big on recycling, except for "mixed paper" as we call it in Chapel Hill. The newspapers and magazines here go into a conainer that's a five minute walk from our front door. Ditto with glass of all kinds.

The rest - and I mean virtually everything that won't "spoil" (excluding mixed paper....something I am seeking to clarify, but also including cardboard, plastic bags, etc.) - goes into a city-provided rolling cart with a smart yellow lid. Once a week, they come by in the late evening and empty those containers up and down the street. We put it out early evening and bring it in the next morning.

And, just as in Chapel Hill, everything we can possibly compost goes into the composter.

What's still surprising to me is that now that we have far less "all other" garbage than goes into our yellow-topped cart, another truck still passes our house 5 nights a week to collect any garbage that we put out.

But that's just our experience and what I see and hear from our French neighbors.

Another day it would be even more interesting to see how we compare overall in how much garbage we are producing here on Mt Boron and back in Chapel Hill and what the recycling trends are.