GrumbleSmiles

This is the third blog in the series of posts about bins and rubbish.   A key question to ask is “what is the difference between clutter and rubbish?”   It occurs to me that one mans clutter is another man’s rubbish.   I say man, because women are generally much tidier than men.

If we could only link up all the hoarders of clutter with the rubbish collectors, we would have a lot less rubbish to dispose of.

But really we need a much more radical solution, so I thought the Last Laugh Looney Party may have some ideas :-

• Maybe we could insist that manufacturers collect all the excess packaging their goods arrive in and also pick the product when it expires.    Very quickly there would be a lot less wrapping going on and products would be made to last a lot longer.
• Littering could be made a criminal offence, including any waste you were thinking of throwing out.   Bin collections by Local Authorities would no longer be necessary.    Convicted offenders could be sentenced to collect 10 times the weight of waste they threw away.
• Or we could build one great big giant rubbish mountain, say somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, where it won’t offend too many people.    They should have voted for the LLLP instead of SNP 🙂.    Eventually it could be turned into a tourist attraction with ski lifts and artificial snow.  The methane from it could be used to give free energy to the Scots to compensate them for all the smell when the wind blows southwards.
• How about if we sent all of the worlds rubbish into space.   A rubbish cloud over the north and south poles might act like a solar shield.    It could fill up the holes in the ozone layer and eliminate the problem of global warming.

Where does all the rubbish go?

Maybe the Pig Bins really do go to pigs.   That used to be the case, but after outbreaks of swine fever, that has all been stopped.    So who is eating it now ?   Maybe a pop-up restaurant or a quickly moving on roadside cafe.

The garden bins are made into compost and sold back to gardeners.  This is a clever bit of commercial enterprise by the Council.  You might even say it was downright cheek, since they now charge extra for having garden bins in the first place.   You could of course have a compost heap in your garden and save the Council doing all that running around.

The wonderful recycling bin, with its shiny bright blue lid, sucks in everything like a black hole.   In turn it creates hundreds of jobs for sorters.  Paper sorters, cardboard sorters, plastic sorters, bottle sorters,  metal collectors and sorters for all the left overs.   Of course we don’t do that sorting in our country, we send recycled waste to be sorted halfway around the world, so someone else can do the messy job.  The carbon footprint of transporting the rubbish by supertanker to the sorting hubs in the third world, probably contributes more to global warming.  But hey, who cares, it enables the politicians and the local councils to claim that they are doing their bit to save the environment.

Finally, the general waste is reluctantly sent to landfill.  Obviously over time, as we all get much more efficient at eliminating general waste, there may be nothing left to fill all the 10,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Once upon a time we all had one small rubbish bin which was emptied by the Council every week.   No fuss, no guidelines and no worries.   It just happened.

Now that’s all changed.    We are all environmentally friendly and expected to save the world from sinking under the weight of all out waste.     Who could possibly disagree with that ?

So now we have 5 bins !    One for food waste, otherwise known as the “pig bin”, although I doubt if the pigs get to eat any of our left overs.   Two for garden waste, because bonfires in the garden are not good for global warming, nor the nextdoor neighbour’s washing on the line.    Then there is the most virtuous bin, the recycling bin.     This is the one that Councils are most proud of.    So much so, that they display big signs saying what percentage  of waste they have recycled each week.    Finally there is the bin you are now almost ashamed to put out on the street, the general waste bin.    This is only collected every three weeks, though I don’t doubt that someone in the Council is already thinking about extending it to annual collections once the populous have been fully re-educated about the evils of waste.

There is just one niggle in my mind about all this effort we are putting in to sifting and sorting the rubbish in our lives.   What exactly are the Councils doing with all this rubbish?