Cleaning up a small part of Australia ...

... a day late.

Due to getting confused by some stuff about our garbage survey I forgot that yesterday was Clean-up Australia Day so had to do my patch today.  This is about 600m on Captains Flat rd and I do both sides.

The start was not that propitious since I was greeted with this sight.
This is the area where the school buses drop the kids off after school.   However I don't think the parents are sufficiently bored to knock off a 4 litre Coolabah and 6 bottles of red.  Unless the schools are very advanced I doubt if they allow the kids to duck down to Liquorland to get a little something for the bus trip home.  So I assume it is a bunch of grot bags who dumped the results of their day's pig-hunting.

My impression was that apart from this there was generally less litter than has been the case in the past.  Perhaps that means the message about keeping the place tidy is sinking in a bit?

I picked up 2 sacks of recyclable stuff and 1.5 sacks of garbage.

  1. The garbage was basically grubby packaging of all sorts.  Drink containers from the fast food outlets (Maccas, KFC and Hungry Jack's all ell represented) were the most numerous item.
  2. Recyclables were very varied this, as opposed to the past where there has seemed to be one brand that made a big contribution.
    1. Soft drinks were possibly the most numerous with Pepsi slightly in front of Coke.  
    2. In terms of "Energy drinks" Red Bull seems to be the most popular (Mark Webber fans from Queanbeyan?) while I didn't notice a single can of Mother, which two years ago was the major contributor to the stuff picked up.
    3. Relatively few beer bottles of several brands.
Unfortunately when I got back to the area where the school bus picks kids up the sight was not too good.
The circled objects were things like fruit pie wrappers and tetrapacks from fruit juice.  Obviously some of our junior kids haven't got the message yet.  So if you know a micro-bogan in this area please explain to them that they should 
a)  have  breakfast at home and/or
b) take their crud with them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more