Three days a week I walk to the local Gym and workout with a trainer for 30 minutes. I normally enjoy the walk down a back lane away from the traffic but this Wednesday it was very different!

The first obstacles were separate waste management trucks collecting recycling, general house hold and green waste from a series of bins in the lane. Very noisy and hard to avoid as they sped past me to the next bin, then stopped and mechanically lifted the bins, put them down, then sped on past me again to the next bin to repeat. It was horrendous in a narrow lane. Necessary I guess – but bad timing. They seemed to be leapfrogging me all the way to the main road which I need to cross to reach the gym.

Next came a council truck, mulcher and chain saw gang who were pruning overhanging branches – wow – they may have had ear muffs on to reduce the noise but the residents and pedestrians did not.

Then there were the frustrated commuters who were trying to reach their parking spots that access the lane and the more help up they were, the more furiously they planted their foot when there were a few spare metres between other obstacles.

All in all, the normally pleasant walk to gym was rather horrendous and unbelievably noisy. Not a pleasant way to wake up and get going in the morning. I am not sure that our inner city environments are really very human friendly places. I rather like the concept where people in many parts of Europe take their rubbish to the appropriate bins themselves. That way they all get some exercise as well as reducing the stop starts and the distances the waste removal trucks have to travel.

Technorati Tags: waste management, recycling, commuting, walking, gym, adventurous, environment, waste removal, noise

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 1:26 am and is filed under Latest activities & outreach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.