Rubbish and recycling

Honestly, my mood decides. If there's a plastic bottle right by my feet and there's a bin nearby, I'll pick it up. If it's something soggy and unidentifiable, I walk on and feel slightly guilty. What I never do is add to it; I'll carry an empty milk tea cup around for half an hour rather than leave it on a wall. Recycling at home is simpler than it sounds. We flatten cardboard boxes and rinse out bottles and cans, and every couple of weeks a scrap collector comes down the alley shouting, weighs the lot and pays us a few thousand dong. It's hardly a fortune, but it beats throwing it away. At school we did get some lessons on the environment, though it was mostly drawing posters of a crying Earth. The one useful thing was a campaign where each class collected used batteries. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future. Supermarkets are cutting down on plastic bags, and my younger cousins tell me off if I forget my reusable cup, so the message is clearly getting through.