Recycling, the Portuguese way

Sometimes the Portuguese really do have some good ideas, this one being a recycling stations. All over Portugal I assume, certainly in the Algarve they are scattered all over the place in populated areas, some only a few hundred metres apart. In fact within a 3 kilometre radius of my house there must be over a 100 such collection points, the one in the picture nicely positioned outside someone's bedroom, not sure I would be too keen on that though, especially when Carlos comes along to dispose of his glass bottles at 6 in the morning.

They are very neat and tidy, most of the new ones are below ground level. Not at all like the ones that you have to drive 5 miles to in the UK, usually outside your local Asda, which defeats the point in my book. After you have used all that fuel, you arrive only to get there and find someone's old pram, cardboard boxes all over the place, broken glass on the floor, or the local divvy rifling through what someone chucked out yesterday.

Here at Whittaker Towers we like to do our bit to save the planet so we recycle anything we can, religiously separating items for the respective containers at the recycling centre.

Then every week along comes the big collection lorry and empties all the bins into the same space in the back of the truck and probably takes it to the local landfill, priceless, why do I bother.