Saturday 21 August 2010

Confused...

Today was productive - I cleared out a corner of the garden that had been lost to weeds, junk, old discarded toys, and general rubbish. It is now clean, tidy and (more importantly) navigable on foot without protective clothing. We also had a nice crop of blackberries for lunch, as they seemed to good to waste.

Talking of waste, the rubbish fell into several categories. The overgrown plants are now on the compost heap, and in three years will be doing good elsewhere in the garden. The brambles and other weeds are safely in the green bin - I want them out of the garden for good.

Then there is the general waste. It is currently occupying the (entire) rear load space of the landrover, and will be heading for the local tip tomorrow.

Now, can someone from British local government please hurry along to explain to me the following. I am going to fire up the landrover tomorrow, consume diesel, and emit CO2 in order to take this domestic rubbish to the tip. A few short days later, a lorry is going to go past my house and collect other rubbish and take it (ultimately) to the same tip.

The lorry is not allowed to take the rubbish from today's clearout, because my allocated quota of rubbish is insufficient to allow this. This is because the rubbish quota is a fixed size per household, regardless of the size of the household, the house, or the council tax bill that applies to it. Therefore, the lorry that will be coming past anyway is not allowed to take the rubbish, and it must be conveyed by an additional journey.

Now, all of that I can understand. What I do not understand is, how did you get that through on environmental grounds??

5 comments:

  1. "What I do not understand is, how did you get that through on environmental grounds??"

    Easy! You get it through because the term 'environmental grounds' has been refefined to mean 'Any old flannel we can give the 'customer' to make our lives easier and theirs just that little bit harder'...

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  2. Umm... for every bit of "waste" there's now an epic amount of additional rubbish Given their head I suspect that every wheelie bin will have a multipart carbon form and an associated Fixed Penalty ticket for incorrect declarations of the contents.

    The whole Eurofarce of landfill tax and municipal waste management has been called Kafka-esque - what next? Taser toting re-cycling wardens riding shotgun on garbage trucks? This is rubbish - poor pun entirely intended.

    What is thrice exasperating is that these pen pushing gits want to poke their noses in everywhere but will not, under any circumstances get their hands dirty - no siree. Pristine PPE and clipbboards, no practical knowledge and piss poor attitude.

    These public servants really need to revisit their mission statement

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  3. Welcome, Gordon! I wonder - if we eliminated the bureaucracy around bin collections, could we afford to collect them properly?

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  4. I always wonder how environmentally friendly the glass collections are. A separate truck comes round to collect glass and presumably takes itfor recycling. I doubt, by the time that all this has been done, it is any more environmentally friendly than producing new glass.
    As they are inert, what's wrong with landfill as, contrary to the propagandists, we are currently digging more out of the ground at quarries, brickfields, etc, than we are putting back.

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