Pay as you throw vs recycling

Once again, the Gummint's attempts to reduce the amount going to landfill are in the news. This time it is their impoverished and poorly thought out pay as you throw pilot schemes. These would have lasted 3 years, and then been evaluated to decide whther or not to introduce them on a wider, national level.

Talk about too little, too late.

Weirdly, the VT accompanying the story showed diggers etc on a landfill site moving what appeared to be tons of wood amongst the plastic bags etc. One has to wonder what wood is doing making it to a landfill in the 21st century. After all, just because London is a smokeless zone, doesn't mean that the rest of the country is. So, it could be burnt to keep a few OAPs and low income families warm. Or it could be reused, to make MDF or whatever else scrap wood can be used for.

Recently, there was an announcement about how much the blue bags that our council, Eden District, has introduced and the extra tonnage that adds per year to landfill. One would think that the cost of introducing wheelie bins would be substantially less than the cost of producing the blue bags with EDC printed on them, and the fines which are heading their way from the EU for overloading the landfill and making little attempt to reduce the amount going in to landfill.

Eden District Council is a prime example of the gross stupidity being exhibited by our councils, with our money. As I have mentioned before, our local tip used to be run by a guy called Stig. He would keep a keen eye open for what was going into the skips, and make sure that anything that could be potentially reused was rescued and put to one side. Going to the tip inevitably meant you came away with more than you took! But it was generally all useful stuff. Our Belfast sink came from there, as well as many other items that have been reused around the house, and saved us a few quid.

Now, our local tip is run by two 'bouncers' who insist that everything is put into the skips, whether it is potentially useful or not to someone else, and that nothing can be removed. At that point, I was pleased to discover Freecycle, which does allow us to clear the shed of items that are bound to be of some use to someone else and post them on our local Freecycle forum. If only more people knew about Freecycle and groups were in existence across every area of the country. Last week we acquired a washing machine from there (Thanks, Fiona!!) and it's nice to know that 1) we have saved something from landfill that functions brilliantly and 2)we haven't encouraged yet another washing machine to be built by buying a new one.

Our local recycling bank is situated about a mile out of the village, meaning that anyone wishing to dispose of bottles etc has to drive there. Gordon Bennett, how dim are these councillors? How unenvironmentally friendly is having to use petrol every time we want to recycle? Why couldn't they have put it in the village so everyone could easily access it? It's not as if we don't have plenty of places where it could have been put - pick a field!

And I keep hearing stories about recycling banks being closed because they are "too well-used". Arg! Every time I have been to any of our local recycling banks recently, they tend to be overflowing, as more and more people get into recycling as much of their household rubbish as possible. And this is the way it should be. Until the council realise that the people are willing to do all this hard graft for them, and introduce wheelie bins which they empty when they would normally collect the rubbish, we seem to be lumbered with this ludicrous situation. After all, they are going round every household anyway, so why not reduce the amount going to recycling banks by collecting it from our doorsteps in one hit?

And where are the community compost bins? I've noticed that in our blue bags each way, the thing taking up the most space is firstly plastic packaging - we now go to the butcher for most of our meat rather than the supermarket as that is the prime offender - and secondly, food waste. We do have a compost bin, if I could just find it in the chaos of belongings that have resulted from moving house 3 times in 6 months, but how many households don't, and have no garden etc to put the compost on?

Compost generates heat, and I think it is in Nottinghamshire where they have municipal compost heaps which generate heat etc for public buildings. These, as far as I recall, have been in place since the 70s so it's hardly a new idea. Secondly, compost has a resale and reuse value. Considering our local farmers are spreading human shit on the land around the village currently, (and yes, it STINKS!) if the worst came to the worst and it was given to them for free to spread on their land, at least it wouldn't be going in landfill, and it would be putting some good back into the land that grows our food.

As an island, we seem remarkably wasteful of the resources we have. Whether that is overfishing our seas, or ignoring the food that lives wild on our shores, or encouraging a culture where things are obsolete almost before they have been bought, we seem profligate with what we have, and uncaring about what we could have.

The crap attitude in council chambers about dealing with the problems is, I suspect, national. And extends clearly into Westminster. I think that if we dealt with the lights off issue I posted about yesterday, (did I hit publish?!), and the compost and recycling, we'd make far more of an impact than any of the other supposedly good ideas that come out of either Westminster or Brussels to make a difference to waste on this part of our planet.

Why is it so difficult? If some councils can run scrap stores, and give every household and business a wheelie bin (some are divided into 2 or 3 partitions for different recyclable materials), and sort out composting, then why can't that be adopted nationally? It apparently only takes 30 days of doing something each day for it to become a habit, so how long really would it take to retrain this nation to reuse, reduce and recycle??