Stolen goods or just recycled?

Please put your reclable stuff in the crates provided!

We are fanatical recyclers. It helps if you have to pay for all the rubbish that is not recycled of course, but I have always been a recycler. Ask the poor people I have shared houses with in the past, about the stacks of old newspapers and boxes full of bottles and cans if you don’t believe me. I even used to recycle the aluminium cans from work many years ago, you could get 1p a can from the scrap man. It was a pity I didn’t realise that half of the cans sold in those days were steel, which meant I had to spend a whole afternoon checking which ones stuck to the fridge doorpost (did you know there is a magnet in the fridge doorpost?) to split the recyclable aluminium from the non-recyclable (in those days) steel cans.

So it is no surprise that we provide the people who stay in our gîtes and on the campsite with recycling boxes. Most (but not all) people use them and we then make sure that the waste is sorted and gets to the right place. Often there are interesting magazines or useful jam pots put into these boxes and then I truly re-cycle them by using again.

But just the other day we found something which might have been stolen. So what do you do? Do you go to the police? Do you contact the owner and return the goods (we knew where it had come from), do you turn a blind eye because this is after all a rubbish bin and are we our campers’ keepers? Or lastly do you assume that the person who put the item in the bin had in fact bought it and after use, decided to throw it away?

Hanging out to dry

I’ll clarify things a little. The afore-mentioned item was in fact soaking wet, it had either been left out in the rain or dropped in a puddle, but even so it was worth saving. Cees brought it indoors and asked if I wanted it.

Having never owned one of these things, the answer was yes of course, so he carefully removed the centre staples and I peeled it apart sheet by sheet and set it out to dry. After a few hours on my wash rack all was dry and reconstructed and now I am the owner of a Taizé song book.

Recycled

There still rests the tricky question of whether I will be arrested for handling stolen goods or not... so please don’t tell anyone.



For information on holiday accommodation near the shop in Taizé where you can buy a Taizé song book click here.