'Irresponsible' residents dump live kitten, snake in recycling bins
Among a host of bizarre things that ended up at a recycling centre was a live kitten that miraculously survived a truck crusher, being dumped onto a cement floor and scraped up by a machine.
The young animal was only removed from the haul of rubbish when a person scooped it up off a conveyor belt manned by humans tasked with separating recyclable goods from general waste.
A cruel individual was thought to have disposed of the kitten in their yellow bin, which potentially sat out in the sun all day before its contents were crushed inside a truck and driven for up to an hour.
Unfortunately it wasn’t the only living thing to end up at the Fraser Coast Recycling Centre, about 250 kilometres north of Brisbane, Queensland, with workers also finding a live red belly black snake.
Local councillor Phil Truscott alerted his following to the discoveries on Wednesday, speculating that “irresponsible” people had dumped both the kitten and live snake in their bins intentionally.
“You think about the journey the little pussy cat went on. First, someone’s put it in the yellow bin, then put it out the front in the heat and that then stays there all day,” Mr Truscott told Yahoo News Australia.
“Then the man comes along, picks it up and puts it in the back of the truck, and in the back of the truck they have an automatic crushing machine that crushes everything to compact it.
“Then they take it all the way to the recycle centre which is a long way for some areas. It can be up to an hour-long trip. It then gets dumped onto a cement area and picked up, very roughly, by a big scooper and shoved onto a conveyor belt.
“So he survived all that. He deserves to live.”
Mr Truscott said up to 100 needles also had to be pulled out of the recycling system at the centre each day, along with soiled nappies which were another common feature.
He said someone had even disposed of a gas cylinder that wasn’t even empty, putting staff at risk of a potential explosion.
“The main thing is to be careful and use common sense. Most people are responsible and they do the right thing, if it’s not supposed to go in the yellow bin, put it in the red bin,” Mr Truscott said.
“We’re not talking about people who make mistakes with disposing of plastic items, we’re talking about irresponsible people.”
The kitten has since been adopted by the man who spotted it while working on the conveyor belt.
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