Mama SRL

If it’s Friday, it’s home care. I don’t go shopping on Fridays because a lot of people are doing that already and crowding the markets, and the store staff fills the shelves just then for the upcoming weekend crowd. So on Friday I’m trying to clear the house of things for recycling. Friday is the recycle day. I collect things by category during the week and at the end of it I take them to the places where they are meant for recycle or distruction. I’m a responsible person and I don’t like to leave traces like the snail, so everything I can reuse, I reuse, everything I can recycle, I recycle and I reduce quite a lot of acquisitions through responsible decisions. It is a pleasure to get rid of used batteries, old appliances, used oil or other things that require specific recycling.

Three weeks ago I started recycling my old pans and instead of 3 I only bought 2. We don’t need that much diversity was a final decision after trying to figure our my new choices. Auchan Drumul Taberei is my neighbor and my favorite place since it opened up. Why? Because this is where I find everything I need for shopping, because here I have healthy eating options in the Food Court and because here I can take things for recycling. And after a long period in which that corner of the neighborhood was a fenced ugly square, the area became much cleaner and more beautiful with the hypermarket in the picture. So the building is a gain for the community.

I had in the car all kinds of garbage divided into assortments: paper, plastic, metal and used masks. I left the car at the laundry and started tactfully to put each item in one of the baskets where the accepted type of waste is clearly marked. Don’t you like puzzles? It’s almost the same when you go to landfill according to the items to be recycled.

Among the things gathered for the selective garbage I had a paper coffee cup from Starbucks in which there was a remnant of coffee and I first looked for a waste bin where to drain that residue so then I can put the plastic to plastic and cardboard to cardboard. Sure, cardboard is welcome in making compost from wet matter, but I said I’d still be nice and obedient to my brain dwarfs.

In addition to cardboard, plastic, glass and metal, I also had used batteries and light bulbs or expired medicines. And we also had some old pans that Auchan and Tefal help you recycle: you bring the old pans, they give you a voucher for a 50% discount on a range of new Tefal pans. I gave them 3 pieces, I only took 2 back and I am happy with the choice I made. I gave the third voucher as a gift. I freed up the space, made my life easier because now I cook without oil and I made another happy soul that can take a good frying pan at half price. After I finished the formalities for Tefal, I also asked about where I can recycle the used batteries and I was helped by the kind ladies at the information office. It’s that simple!

Speaking of batteries, I found out that Lidl gives you a new battery for every 7 recycled. Good idea! I have a Lidl nearby. Next time I will try to win batteries for the child’s toys. Also Decathlon has a similar campaign. I recommend recycling old batteries or appliances because it doesn’t help anyone to keep them around the house. I started in 2020 a campaign to get rid of all the old or useless things in the house. It’s pretty hard to give up on things, but if you think about how bad an object full of mercury and other harmful metals can do to you, I’m sure you’ll give up quickly. That motivated me too.

You can’t really recycle everything at Auchan Shopping Gallery, but I’m sure that soon they will also encourage recycling through responsible campaigns. I could not leave the old medicines at any of the pharmacies in the shopping mall, and the clothes were not reported anywhere as being received for recycling. The pharmacies invoked Covid, although other pharmacies received the old medicines, and for the old clothes I did not try to ask the shops. Before the pandemic started in Romania, there was a container near Auchan where you could take your old clothes to be recycled. Now it has been replaced by a container for WEEE from EcoTic. It is also very useful if you do not want to enter the gallery to get rid of used electronics.

For my old clothes I still go to H&M because I like their campaign. I have a 5 lei voucher for each bag taken to them. Please note that you have to bring hem in a plastic bag. I wanted to be eco and I have put them in a paper bag and threw everything in the container, but it seems that their policy says you have to put them in the bag. They accepted my clothes anyway, but in the future I learned not to do it anymore. I don’t really understand why, but let’s say it’s hygienic to be in a plastic bag and the plastic will probably be sorted later. Anyway, I think all the clothes are chopped and the remains are turned into fibers that do not necessarily reach our skin. I will dig into this matter further.

It is advisable to take expired or finished medicines to a pharmacy. Here I encountered difficulties at both pharmacies in Auchan Drumul Taberei. None of them wanted to receive them because of Covid. Well, at one point I had a discussion with a gentleman in the field of environmental protection who told me that it is very expensive to incinerate so that pharmacies cannot afford to store and then incinerate these drug leftovers. However, I find it strange that a chain like Sensiblu or Helpnet does not allow such a thing. I found the solution for them at the Richter Pharmacy in Kaufland. And then for another round of medicines I found at Helpnet in Baneasa Commercial Gallery. You are asked to fill in a form stating the type, origin, patient and possibly the doctor who recommended them.
Used oil, here’s one last sensitive topic. Why? Because I stayed with a 2 liter bottle on the balcony for a long time until I found out that it is recycled at Carrefour. But my problem is that they have strange specifics. They ask for 3 liter or 5 liter pet bottles. I think 3 liters is a bottle of beer or juice. I don’t use any of them. And 5 liters is water. I don’t use that either. I installed a water filter because I don’t want to carry pet bottles and then throw them away and make more bigger plastic pollution. If you haven’t gotten bored reading so far about my solutions, know that I have also drawn some conclusions.
Selective collection means less garbage, so landfills will be harder to fill. Garbage without plastic, metal or glass turns into compost and is easier to manage. The soil would absorb odors if we brought only compostable things to the pit. It is important for us to take into account the impact we have on the planet. For almost a year, since we selected the garbage, we found that we have much less garbage to give to the sanitation company. It is true that there is still a lot of recyclable garbage, but step by step we are making it better.

Every Friday I release the house from the burden of unnecessary things or things that are specifically to be thrown away. Whether they are old batteries, used oil, old clothes, medicines, light bulbs or WEEE, we collect them by category and take them out before the weekend. And I set out to do that in centers near the house. A walk to a store, a pharmacy, a hypermarket or even a selective collection center. There are recycling solutions at Auchan, Kaufland, Carrefour and pharmacies in the area.
At Kaufland Tudor Vladimirescu, if you take pets to the container near the supply area, you will receive discount vouchers for certain products (I received for Edenia frozen foods). Richter Pharmacy within Kaufland Tudor Vladimirescu, for example, receives old medicines. Here you can also take the coins to change them into paper money at the reception of the store because the automatic coin machine does not work at the moment. You also have solutions for small appliances: for example the brush of electric toothbrushes, electric wire, electric thermometers or broken Christmas tree installations. You can carry light bulbs and neon lights. They are extremely polluting through the gases they contain. So be sure to take them out for being recycled where they should be.
And one last tip for things that you have around the house and that you have to throw away, but that you could reuse: glass globes that can break easily and since having my son I can’t really afford to have them around, so I pressed them into small glitter and I intend to use it for future decorations. Or you can put the leftovers from the sharpened colored pencils in a jar and make various paintings together with the little ones. Do you remember our handy work hours? Well, I never had the raw material come in handy. We did not live in the luxury of overcrowding the house. We had the supply only with the strict necessities, the priority was for the moment, we did not make supplies of dozens of pencils or crayons. The little ones are much more pampered now because a visit to Jumbo, Ikea or the hypermarket in the neighborhood definitely offers fun solutions for the little ones. But remember when you had to do I don’t know what picture with glitter and you didn’t have something like that in the house? In the shops we could not find the raw material at the time, so we had to be creative. Why spend money on glitter when we can make very good use of what we have around the house? It is a mentality that we must have and that we cannot implement overnight. We need time to learn what to do and how to reduce our impact on the environment. That is why it is important to gradually learn with the means we already have at hand.