This time next week I’ll be in a classroom teaching one of my new classes.

From xkcd.

OK this is getting silly. At one time I had a single PC and it ran an IRC client and I could chat to hordes of random people on the Internet for a few hours, before running up a huge phone bill. I also had email, but nobody to email things to. This was back in 1997 just in case you were wondering.

Right now I’m signed on to IRC, MSN, Skype, Google Talk, GMail and a web forum. Oh and I have my mobile phone.

That’s just this PC. With my N800 I can do all of those too, and, as I discovered earlier tonight, I can MSN from my XBox 360 which is a painful experience without a keyboard (so get a USB keyboard and plug it in). These aren’t just little gimmicks I play with out of curiosity, they’ve now become quite important methods of communication. I use my N800 quite a lot as a portable Skype phone and web browser, since sometimes it’s nice to chat to your friends when making the tea or watching TV.

Now if only the mobile phone operators could make GPRS very very cheap so I could be on Skype permanently when not at home. Of course they’d hate that since I’d not be using their calling plans.

I’m back from Spain, I’ll post about that later.

While taking my washing out earlier, I started chatting with my neighbour. He was ripping up cardboard boxes to put into the council-provided recycling bins. Our council provides each house with two bins; one green bin for normal rubbish and one brown bin for paper and cardboard.

He wants to know what the council does with the things they recycle. No, this isn’t another post about sneaky councils dumping their “recycled” stuff in the ground to meet government targets. No.

This is about money.

There are companies that will buy cardboard and aluminium to recycle into new cans or Ikea furniture. Obviously the council sells their recycling to these companies to make money.

What do they do with the money? Does it make our council tax lower, pay for better services or what?

Also, why do individual councils have really inconsistent recycling schemes? In Oldham the residents are given a small plastic box to put glass, tins and bottles in. They also get a bag for paper - not cardboard. Over here we have just cardboard and paper. Another council has a red bin for cardboard and paper, a green bin for “organic waste” and a small black box for presumably tins and glass.

What does your council let you recycle from your house, and what do you think they do with it all? Comment, I’m interested… Remember, LiveJournal readers, you can can use your LiveJournal URL for OpenID login - the same goes for other OpenID providers.