Even though it is may Bank Holiday today our noble bin men came and emptied our rubbish, took away our recycled paper, glass, plastic and tin, and emptied our garden refuse and biodegradable ‘household waste’! As I made our morning cup of tea I watched them bantering with each other as they quickly and efficiently moved from house to house, emptying everyone’s brown bin, green boxes, black bin and garden waste bags. They are mostly young men, all with cheery expressions, all rushing around, running between the neighbours’ houses, no doubt having to keep to some schedule defined by some time-management consultant. They are probably not called bin men any longer, they are probably waste disposal operatives!
As a child I lived in a ground floor flat, and the lady who owned it lived above us on the first floor. She was very elderly, and utterly lovely, and we called her Aunty. She called the bin men, ‘ash men’ because in the old days they would have been taking ash away from the houses as there was no central heating and everyone had coal fires. There probably wasn’t as much rubbish when she was young, there would have been no plastic or artificial fibres, old materials and clothes would have been taken by the rag and bone men, as well as other recyclable rubbish, kitchen waste would have gone onto a compost heap (at least in the country areas)
I don’t suppose there was as many newspapers or magazines – and certainly none of the zillions of advertising inserts; magazines, and comics, would have been kept and reread or passed onto someone else, and old paper would have been used in the household, and what was left either burned, or given to the rag and bone man. periodically a horse and cart would come round with a man shouting for ‘any old iron’ and he would take away metal objects. Far less food would have been bought ready-prepared and any that there was would have had recyclable packaging such as paper, cardboard, metal, or glass, and it would have been a much simpler amount of wrapping, not the complicated plastic/inflated polystyrene/bubble-wrap etc we battle with now.
Bins in those days were metal, and quite heavy before they had anything put in them! They had to be to made of metal to carry the ashes from household fires; on the lids was inscribed ‘no hot ashes’ I guess for the safety of the ash men, and also to stop the dustcarts from catching fire. We always called them carts, but when our elderly ‘Aunty’ upstairs was a child, they must have been carts pulled by horses.
One of my favourite books by Dickens is Our Mutual friend; one of the characters is ‘The Golden Dustman’ the wonderfully named Noddy Boffin. Dickens gives us a vivid idea of how ‘waste’ was managed in Victoria times; waste was productive then, it’s a shame so much of our waste is wasted!
Lois Elsden 