waider | greening the batcave

I finally got around to hauling some (in fact, very little) of my old computer gear plus some bedding and a bag of shoes to the recycling depot in Ringsend. Finding information on recycling is a bit confusing: there's the Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council website, which tends to focus more on getting information out there than it does on laying it out clearly, so the details on Ballyogan Recycling Centre (my alternative to Ringsend) are duplicated, stale, etc. depending on which versions you look at. Repak seem to go to great lengths to hide information from you, putting a thin menu on each website section that your attention is completely distracted from by the boilerplate rubbish on the rest of the page. WEEE Ireland, the newest of the bunch, provides a county-level map of the country but no links to useful information like what waste is accepted at which centers. And finally Dublin Waste is about the best of the lot, with the minor exception that the price list for Ringsend is out of date, which makes me wonder what else is out of date there. The location of the Ringsend Centre is a little tricky, too; it's the first exit off a roundabout where, if you miss that and take the second instead thinking there might be an alternative route around, you find yourself paying €1.65 to cross the Liffey on the East Link toll bridge and there's no means of correcting your navigational error short of turning around in the middle of a narrow two-lane road. Anyway, when finally I got there, the guy on the gate looked at the stuff in the car and waved me in without charging, which was neat; the prices, as noted, are not those listed on the web (they've actually dropped, perhaps to encourage people to recycle) and at worst I'd have paid a tenner for my bootload of junk. Now to try and consolidate the rest of the computer junk into as small and non-commercial-looking a pile as possible and see about getting rid of that.