When it comes to environmentalism, you don’t normally think of Russia of somewhere particularly ‘green’. Partly that’s true, you’re more likely to see a plane here than a car running on a Hybrid engine. One area they excel at though is recycling bottles and cans. At most street corners you can catch a babooshka (old lady) collecting these in sacks.

Of course it’s not based on some sort of middle-class troubled conscience, people get paid to give these bottles and cans to this women. She then returns them for profit to the factories. This isn’t anything new, we used to do the same in Europe and the US. Return your empty coke bottles and get a quarter kind of thing.

I’m not quite sure why we stopped doing this to be honest? Having a financial incentive to return bottles seems to work well - the women on our street corner rarely finishes a day without 15-20 full sacks. The homeless here even get some sort of income collecting these bottles and cans from the rubbish bags and streets. This process seems sustainable, profitable and pays wages into the local economy.

Maybe the money was too small for us to bother with in the end? I can’t imagine there is a large profit margin. However it was a shock to Anna to know that far from getting money for our old bottles, we choose to pay to have our materials collected and recycled in Brighton. Heh

Maybe our obsession with hygiene killed off this practice - these returned bottles are stream washed and re-used rather than being melted down (much like our milk bottles used to be in the UK when I was growing up).

Re-using is more environmentally friendly than recycling (less energy used) and seems safe enough. However we have a problem with re-using objects which have been in contact with strangers or used for food or drink. I’ve seen the same trend in the medical industry - everyone gets their own disposable plastic thermometer now rather than a sterile glass one. We used to re-use many items which now get put into landfills.

10 a.m. on a Sunday and 16 sacks already - well lets be honest Russians do drink quite a bit, not having a bottle recycling scheme in this country would be a tragedy!