Recycling

For a few days I fled from the Caribana music festival because during this event it is impossible to sleep due to noise pollution. Switzerland, despite being so strict about other forms of noise pollution is lax about the noise pollution from music festivals. Most people plan holidays to flee it. I did too, but I still denounce it. Having said this I stayed in a small village half way up the Jura and was able to walk a short distance to recycle cardboard, cans and PET bottles.

I love to recycle but recently on Saturday I have been hiking or climbing so I couldn’t go to the recycling centre. The result is that I often accumulate recycling for several weeks. One day I finally have a saturday morning free, and that isn’t a public holiday, and I take things to recycle.

My other reason for not going to the recycling centre much is that the road to and from the recycling is narrow. It’s not narrow if you drive old cars, but it is narrow if you drive modern cars. My car is narrow and small so I can drive down that road, two abreast, but usually I wait for the path to be cleared, as that is the norm, at the moment.

I don’t like to go recycling for two reasons. I usually end my daily walk just at the time when the recycling centre opens during week days so I don’t want to go back and spend time that I could invest in other chores in something as relaxed as recycling. The second reason is that because traffic is bad I usually prefer not to be one of the cars driving down a narrow path when it is not urgent to do so.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday the recycling centre is open from 1600-2000 or so, which is great if you’re working and want to go after work. The drawback to going at this time is that the one for local villages is down a narrow road where cars can barely pass each other. If you go at rush hour traffic you have commuters, and you have people heading to recycle.

When I had the scooter I would often go with that, because with a scooter it’s easy to go down a narrow road despite cars coming towards you. In a car you need to be careful that the mirrors on your car don’t hit the car coming the opposite way. There are two issues. The first is that the road was narrowed to slow down traffic. The second is that a road that should have no commuter traffic does have commuter traffic. Ideally this would be a one way road system.

Yesterday I switched from the trail gloves I have been wearing since May for some new ones. The old shoes are still wearable, for indoor activities or for road trips but they have reached their limit.

Just a Worn Sole

The only thing wrong with these shoes is that the sole, where my heel pushes the ground has worn through. It no longer provides support for my heel, especially for long walks. As a result I feel the pressing need to swap shoes. The top is still fine and the back of the shoe is still fine. It’s only the sole that has worn through. The material on top is fine. The laces are fine. If I wasn’t walking eight to ten kilometres a day I would keep them in service because they’re fine. They lasted for around five or six months through ninety activities, whether walking, hiking, or running. I am happy with them.

Today is Earth Day, as Google, Moleskine and other companies are reminding us of. Earth Day is an opportunity to think about how to reduce our carbon footprint and ecological impact. 

Sigg recently began to sell aluminium water bottles that are made entirely from recycled aluminium. Instead of encouraging us to recycle our old bottles, they have skipped a step, and now make their bottles from recycled aluminium directly. 

It takes five uses of a recycled Sigg water bottle for the carbon footprint to be offset. Amortising the cost of a bottle takes about 30 litres, so theoretically thirty days if you drink one litre per day.  

For months, or even years, I have seen adverts for the Rivella Unlimited Bottle. it is a competition that you can play, and if you win the competition you get a Sigg Rivella bottle that you can get refilled anywhere for free. I thought the idea of putting Rivella into any reusable bottle was absurd and messy so I didn’t try. Today I did.

As I poured the Rivella from a half litre rivella bottle into the Half litre sigg bottle I was afraid that it may overflow and I was careful not to lose too much gas. Eventually the transfer from plastic to metal was complete so I went on my daily walk. I wasn’t thirsty during the walk so it was air cooled by the ambient air temperature. It is currently 6°c according to the Apple weather app via an apple watch. It is fridge temperature outdoors, so perfect for such an experiment.

Today I found a course about JavaScript patterns on Linkedin. I have been following course after course about Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Angular, React, EcmaScript, CSS and more, but most of them tell you how to do things. I watched plenty of their explanations and I managed to copy the code and get it to work but when they said “challenge time” I was usually lost.

I listened to the JavaScript Jabber podcast and in several episodes they described design patterns. In all of my learning I have learned how to read and copy code. By learning about programme patterns I will learn to structure code correctly. With these notes I will have a blueprint from which to work.

Yesterday I went to recycle. Two weeks ago when I went, everyone was wearing a mask. Yesterday when I went all the masks are gone. I was the only person wearing one. Within the last day or two the Swiss government has told people that they can walk around without a mask, and enjoy summer. They said this at the same time as there was an increase of new COVID-19 cases. Today the number of new infections has clearly started to rise. This is true of England, France, Spain and other countries.

Earlier today or yesterday at some point I was thinking of the song When I’m 64, and that I should share it. I’m not 64. Quarantine hasn’t aged me so drastically. I felt the need to make that joke.

Recycling

For the first time in two months I went to the recycling centre today. For at least two months I cleaned everything that could be recycled and sorted it into the correct bag. I was waiting for an auspicious time to take all this stuff to the recycle centre and today was that day.