Here's a question I ask myself each morning on my way to work:
Why is that stove out on the street?
I am pretty sure it's a car-related issue. The people who chucked this thing out either don't have a car, or they're too lazy/cheap to rent a trailer and take it to the landfill. So they've reasoned (correctly) that within only a couple of months someoene else will take care of this.
I'm not sure if this goes for kitchen appliances, but when it comes to furniture it can easily be cheaper to buy a new sofa and have it delivered, than it is to rent a car and a trailer to get rid of the old one. This is unsettling even for a native, and drives immigrants up the wall. In many countries getting rid of stuff is free: When you put something on the street, it will have vanished magically in a matter of minutes, often enriching somebody in the process. Put something on the street here, and it stays there.
Unless it's a bicycle, of course, which will be nicked in no time no matter how cruddy it looks and how securely locked it is.
Too much stuff, too much stuff.
But, it seems, not enough bicycles, not enough bicycles.
4 comments:
We have the same problem in Germany. In fact where we used to live household waste was weighed and you paid per kilo. I must admit that we frequently took bags full of nappies to The Towns and left them in a public bin.
Of course we could have used 'real' nappies, but you pay for water disposal here, by the cubic metre, and the cost would have been way above the cost of trash from disposable nappies...
Wouldn't it be simpler if governments provided tax incentives for simple appliances that can be repaired by normal people? then they can be reused when someone upgrades.
... Although thinking about it, simplicity is probably why bikes get stolen: they keep value.
It made for a great photograph though!
I have enough property that the previous owners found a gully to use for their personal landfill. It's disgusting and I wish I had the money to have it removed. But, like you say, some kids down the road prospered (a little), by digging out the steel... much of which looked like your oven.
Alsa, there were no bicycles.
Interesting deduction.
There is a big oak tree outside me and my sister's house. Whenever I have something I no longer want, no longer use, etc, I put it by the giving tree. From shoes to bedframes, it's usually gone within an hour.
We call it the giving tree ^_^
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