Junk Week

The towns and cities in Australia by UK standards are pretty spotless.

Rubbish is kept to a minimum and there seems to be quite a large army of street cleaners that help keep the places looking nice and tidy.

This applies to the suburbs to. You don’t see blokes riding along on their ’super sucker 2000′ street vacuum cleaners but they must exist in some form as any rubbish spied on one day is quickly tidied away by the next.

An interesting sign appeared on our street the other day. It was erected by someone from the council and simply had ‘Junk Week’ written on it in big bold letters with some simple instruction advising the local residents to leave their junk out for collection.

For someone who was faced with getting rid of 13 years of junk because I could never get around to ordering a skip, this sounds like a fantastic idea.

I remember hearing about Junk week when I visited Sydney a few years ago. I was in a taxi and commented to the driver about how scruffy the suburb was because the home owners appeared to have just chucked their old junk out on the roadside.

He told me that twice a year the council very kindly collects this junk on behalf of the residents.

And we’re not talking about a couple of bags of grass clippings either.

Driving to the station yesterday I saw several old fridge freezers, TV’s, washing machines, mattresses, trees (yes a full sized tree cut up and left in a big pile on the road side), computers with various associated consumables, sofas, kettles, you name it, people appear to chuck out everything during junk week.

How do they collect it? Well, a group of blokes some on foot, some driving garbage trucks and some driving mini diggers with special junk picking up attachments do the rounds and literally just scoop all this stuff up and take it away.

How nice!

In the UK fly tipping was a big issue because it was so difficult (and often expensive) to get rid of old junk. Perhaps this is another way in which some countries could learn from the wise ways of the Aussies?

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