Thursday , March 28 2024

A Waste of a Cycle

Soon, so I am told, I will only be getting my household rubbish collected every 2 weeks. Well whoop de doo. Instead of my weekly trip out with my green bin I’m going to be forced to recycle. This means that I will then have a lovely selection of receptacles for my rubbish – a white bag, a green bin and a brown bin. Will I be paid for the extra work required to sort out my rubbish into categories and put it into bins? Of course I won’t!

So I shall put the white bag into the brown bin, then take a saw and cut up the brown bin and place that in the green bin. Hopefully the lads on the bin lorry will take it away and dispose of it for me. I urge you to do the same – from what I can see recycling isn’t really about ‘saving the planet’ – it’s a money making con.

I don’t want three or more different receptacles for my rubbish thank you – and I want my household waste collected every week please. I pay council tax for this and as a curmudgeonly old scrote this is what I demand… just get on with it. I heard on the radio earlier this week that it has now been recommended that the government should commission a study to see if bi-weekly rubbish collections (which have already been introduced by upwards of 150 councils) are actually suitable for urban areas. Well I can save them the money… THEY AREN’T! Rubbish collections were introduced many years ago to stop people dying from parasitic diseases and infections being spread by rats and other vermin (damn those squirrels)… and it worked. So why change now? Well, some environmentalist dork has decided that we have to recycle because it will ‘save the planet’ and that all this recycling activity means that the frequency of rubbish collections can be reduced and so we will all have to go back to having a stinking bin full of maggots outside our house – attracting rats and vermin. Can you imagine it if you eat fish the day after your rubbish usually gets collected? you’ll have the stinking fish heads and guts it the bin for 13 days. Bubonic plague here we come! I know it sounds a bit dramatic but give me a good reason for lowering the collection rate please. Recycling just isn’t it – the connection is at best tenuous and this decision risks public health.

Instead of putting the onus to recycle on the householder all the time why not tackle this problem at source and make manufacturers of goods strip off all the unnecessary packaging that comes with almost everything that you buy.

At least I’m only getting another 2 bins – to show how far recycling mania can go I would like to tell you a tale of a friend who lives in Milton Keynes where recycling has been a way of life for a long time. His wife takes things just a little too far perhaps… She even washes up the milk bottle tops and puts them in the recycling. Tin cans are also recycled… but she removes the labels first (and puts them into the paper recycling) before washing up the cans and putting them in their own receptacle. Similarly, plastic milk containers are washed up and the labels removed from them as well. Life’s just too short for all this messing around.

Will this recycling stop the huge landfill that seems to stretch from Hartlepool to Billingham from getting any bigger? No… of course it wont – what recycling will do is to line the pockets of any chancer who can write the word recycling on the side of a lorry in white paint and deliver a skip. A massive industry has grown up around recycling. We all mistakenly believe that recycling will save the earth – If we all put our newspapers in a bag and give them to the council then they’ll turn up again eventually in supermarkets as toilet rolls. OK – they probably will but here’s 2 important points about this: 1) Someone will make a good living by recycling these newspapers… there’s a cost involved. 2) This does not save the planet – we USE the recycled product and flush it down the toilet. Recycling only delays the inevitable and costs money during the meantime.

As for saving the planet there’s only one thing that will do that – and everyone seems afraid to say it. I have only heard one reputable scientist actually say what the problem is on national television and that was David Bellamy many years ago. The problem is that there’s just too many of us human beings – not for the resources we have but for the types of societies that we live in – where we chase consumer goods all day long.

We are still in an ice age – it’s very very very rare for the Earth to have ice at both poles but because our society has only grown and flourished since the time that we call ‘the end of the last ice age’ we forget this fact. The period we are in is called an ‘interglacial period’ and may last for another 10000 or so years, when the ice will come again. We’ve done a lot of damage in very little time. We have to accept that The Earth is a changing system and has been evolving and changing for a couple of billion years. We have a good idea of what’s happening but we have to bend with the changes and not try and find technological answers – we will lose that battle!

So what’s the alternative then? Well it’s pretty stark actually – it would mean a new type of society – not Capitalism, Communism or any or the other isms that exist out there but a society where people have what they need and not what they want… and there would have to be fewer of us too. I don’t know how this would be achieved but I’m sure that The Earth herself will sort it all out at the end of the current interglacial period when the Northern Hemisphere freezes up again or the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park goes up with the biggest bang ever… or we all start dying of a disease caused by poor hygiene from bi-weekly bin collections in our cities and towns.

Hmmm… I wonder if the rotting corpses of the dead should be put in the green bin, the brown bin, or the white bag?

 

Cheers!

 

Headlander

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