The trundle and the trees: lessons from bin day - in the UK and Kosovo

Two ways neighbours manage their garbage in effective communities

Perhaps today is your rubbish collection day? Just imagining it makes me feel happy - because of a statistic I’ve just read about the real-life functioning of British communities on bin day. I hope you, too, will feel happy to read that forty-one percent of British residents will bring their neighbour’s bin in off the street on collection day.

Britain apparently has 29 million households and I just did the maths. Over the average fortnightly cycle of British rubbish collection, nearly twelve million bins are bumped over kerbs, trundled along paths, and set carefully back into place in this quiet neighbourly courtesy. I’m pretty sure that in those twelve million British households there are annoyances over their neighbours’ noise levels and parking habits, and maybe worse; I’m certain that not all the bin trundlers vote the same way as the people whose bins they trundle. But once the rubbish truck has departed the street, the neighbours still come out of their homes and start the particular bass rumble that two big plastic bins on wheels make when they’re empty and being steered over rough concrete. I’ll always now think of this as the soundtrack to solidarity.

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In my other home, in Kosovo’s capital, Prishtina, every day is rubbish collection day. The trucks arrive each evening and upend the huge skips where we combine our communal rubbish. Prishtina does not yet do any waste separation or municipal recycling so in the rush into the truck of all that my neighbours and I have thrown away, there’s the tinkling of broken glass, the crack of plastic bottles being compressed, together with the slither and slide of mouldy vegetables. It will all go to landfill, so this is not a soundtrack of solidarity, but this country has a different way of showing thoughtfulness around waste disposal. Because in that cacophony of our excess being tipped away into the lorry, there is one sound you will not hear; there is no thunk of stale loaves of bread being hurled and contaminated with the rest. In Kosovo, you never throw away old bread.

Above the bin, or tied round some piece of street furniture or suspended from an overhanging tree is something which make me love my neighbours here. They uphold a tradition that must be wider – perhaps across the Balkans, or even the Muslim world, though this is the only country where I’ve noticed it. I don’t know whether it has its origins in religion or in the fact that many people’s families are only a generation away from going to bed hungry. Perhaps it’s from the years of scarcity that preceded Kosovo’s 1999 war, and the experience as refugees which followed. Nowadays, these are well-fed families whose bin bags are as bulging with snack packets and ice-cream cartons as any modern belly can be with junk food and sweet treats. But nevertheless, when their bread is too stale for them to want to eat it, there is an ancient hunger which calls to them, perhaps in the voice of their grandmother. And the bread doesn’t get thrown away – it gets placed carefully in a clean plastic bag, and is hung up like weird heavy fruit Because there is always someone hungrier than you.

So the old bread dangles in its little plastic amnion. And by morning, it is gone. The men who retrieve it take it home to children who eat it with a fervour and appreciation that is not known at the tables of my neighbourhood. Through the work of our charity, The Ideas Partnership*, I’ve met some of these children. I remember being on a visit to one home, for a conversation about school registration with the eldest daughter, when her father returned from rubbish-picking. He was carrying one of these plastic bags, knotted at the top – like you might bring back a goldfish from the fair. Inside, was a half-finished loaf of bread that had been left like those outside my apartment building. He set it down on the table with a light thud and you could imagine it landing in your belly. Dinner had arrived.

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There’s a line I can draw between these two habits around the bins, even though they’re happening around garbage containers that sit three thousand kilometres apart. Whether you show your awareness of those around you by thinking to take in your neighbour’s bin, or by leaving out food to keep someone from going hungry; whether you build your community by trundling, or by what you hang in the trees - the result is the same.

So what will you bring in for your neighbour today? Or what can you leave out for them - whoever you conceive them to be?

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*Huge thankyou to paid subscribers to this Substack because your subscriptions go towards The Ideas Partnership’s work.