Rubbish, total and utter rubbish!

In the UK rubbish is easy to understand! Every fortnight the dustbin men turn up and collect the rubbish and take it away to deal with it. The other week they might collect recycling, and depending on where you live, depends on what they collect and how often. 

In Wiltshire where we used to live they collected general rubbish and green waste (if you pay extra for the green waste that is) once a fortnight and the alternate weeks they collect recycling. In the recycling bin you can put cardboard, plastic bottles, tin cans, glass, paper and textiles. And whenever you had a clear out or needed to get rid of something bigger you could either take it to the local recycling centre - aka the tip - or for the bigger items call the council and they will collect (for a small fee!)

So here we are in France and having sorted out the electric and water supply, my mind turned to the subject of rubbish! We registered at the Mairie (mayor's to you and me) and subsequently through the post came a letter from SCOM. I have no idea what that stands for by the way, but I knew it was to do with the rubbish. I filled in the form attached and sent it off and then the phone rang...

Now bearing in mind that my French is school standard and I can just about get by face to face, the idea of a telephone conversation in French was more than a little disconcerting!! But despite that I answered the phone and much to my relief discovered that Emilie from SCOM speaks better English than I speak French! We discussed the service and she emailed me the information.

Anyway the bottom line is that we have to pay 147euros a year for our rubbish collection and for that we get 13 rubbish collections a year, as many yellow bag (recycling) collections (fortnightly though) as we like and use of the local tip for up to 15 visits a year. We have to register at the Community office to collect a card to use the decheterie (tip!). We can have another 7 collections a year at an extra charge of 4.5euros a collection, but can't have more than 20 collections a year total! The yellow bag collections are much like the UK recycling bins to be fair, but the rest of the service is definitely not the same!

Anyway all being well our new bin arrives on Thursday! And hopefully a bucket load of yellow bags too!!