22.2.08

Tendring Topics On line

A Load of Rubbish!

Tending District Council and the Essex County Council, like all other authorities dependent on land-fill for waste becoming scarcer and more distant and, more immediately, the government is imposing a substantial financial penalty on local authorities using this method of disposal.

One way to reduce the amount of rubbish going into landfill is, of course, to increase the amount that is recycled. In this field I think that, with a couple of reservations, Tendring District Council deserves credit.

They have maintained weekly collections of refuse and have now introduced weekly on-the-same-day collections of recyclables. Many authorities have, as we have heard on tv and radio, gone over to fortnightly collections. I remember being assured by a national authority on environmental health that the reason that refuse should always be collected at least weekly is that the shortest span of the housefly's life cycle from egg to adult fly is, in warm sunny weather, seven days. Admittedly that assurance was given over 50 years ago, but I doubt very much if the housefly has changed its breeding habits in the past half century.

The Council has also issued us all with not-very-commodious green boxes into which to put our recyclable items for collection. I could have done with a bigger box, and I expect many other householders are the same. However, we can always put the excess in cardboard boxes or white or transparent plastic bags – and I understand that an extra green box can be obtained on request from the Council's Environmental Health Department.

My reservations? The biggest one is the Council's failure to include glass bottles and jars among the items that can be recycled. We can, so they say, take them to the nearest bottle bank. Bottles and jars are heavy and bulky. It would be all but impossible to take them to a bottle bank on foot, and difficult, possibly dangerous, to do so on a bicycle. It is OK with a car, of course, but it seems likely that making a special journey in a car to and from a bottle bank would cancel out any environmental benefit from the recycled glass.

Would we be better off with two or more wheelie bins each, rather than the existing 'black plastic sack' system – one wheelie bin for the landfill rubbish – and the other one or two for recyclables? The amount of landfill rubbish that I put out each week would barely cover the bottom of a wheelie bin! They would certainly look neater though than the piles of filled plastic bags that we see obstructing the footpath on collection day – and they would be less subject to the depredations of cats, seagulls and – perhaps – rats.

I think also, that the Council might do more to encourage those householders who never separate and put out their recyclables, to do so. It surely wouldn't be too difficult for someone to accompany the refuse collectors for a day or two. It would be found that some householders put out several black bags for landfill week after week, but never put out their green box or other receptacle with recyclables.

Some may have a reasonable excuse for this. Others certainly do not. Efforts could surely be made, first by persuasion and later, if necessary, by the application of sanctions on persistent defaulters, to get them to emulate their more civic-minded neighbours.

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'Got a blade?'

In the 1930s, the heroes of books and films popular with boys were often pugnacious characters who achieved their ends largely by violent means. 'Bulldog Drummond', for instance; he was an ex-service man of World War I (officer and gentleman, of course!) who specialised in foiling the machinations of international villains and their glamorous mistresses (always unaccountably referred to as 'adventuresses') and, also of course the plans of those 'beastly Bolsheviks'

Unlike James Bond (in some ways his modern counterpart), he rarely used weapons. He had, readers gathered, enormous fists and could be depended upon to deliver a crippling 'straight left' or shrewd 'right hook' to his opponents before the latter had the chance to draw his automatic or (especially he were a foreigner) his knife from its cunning concealment.

True Brits never, ever, used knives in their fights. Knives were used by 'dirty dagoes, rotten reds' and the like. We fought 'cleanly with our fists'.

From being an avid reader, I soon grew to dislike most things that Bulldog Drummond stood for. I have to say though that I much prefer his attitude to knives as weapons, to the one that seems to be current among some young people today. Few days go by without a report of an adult, or another child, being wounded or killed by a knife-wielding juvenile.

I applaud the government's efforts to stamp out knife crime, particularly among the young. No, I'm not another example of an old man having it in for young people. Young villains have to be discouraged from becoming old villains, who are even worse.

I was particularly interested by the government's discovery, which I hope will be widely publicised, that carrying a knife 'for defence' actually increases, instead of reduces, the risk of attack. It is easy to see how this happens. Two fifteen year olds who dislike each other, both know that the other carries a knife 'for defence'. They quarrel, possibly come to blows and then one of them remembers the sage old advice:

Twice armed is he who hath his quarrel just –

But three times he who gets his blow in fust!

He draws his knife – and tragedy (totally unpremeditated) ensues.

I wonder if the government's advisers have ever considered the possibility that the same principle may apply, not only in the playground, but also in international affairs?

Imagine two world powers with differing ideologies, full of mutual distrust, and both armed with nuclear weapons, purely 'for defensive purposes'. A dispute arises, perhaps over a badly needed resource in short supply (water, food, fuel oil – there are endless possibilities). As the situation worsens, one of the two powers becomes convinced that the other, who claims to have nuclear weapons purely for defence, is about to carry out a nuclear attack. The only option is to launch a 'pre-emptive strike'. The missiles reach their targets with dire effect, but not before the other power has had a chance to launch a counter-attack in kind.

Quite likely the originally feared nuclear attack would have been no more real than Saddam Hussein's fabled 'weapons of mass destruction'.

The result would be real enough! - not just the injury or death of one or more children but mass slaughter of innocent men, women and children on a scale previously unknown: Mutually Assured Destruction – M.A.D.

Never was there a more appropriate acronym!

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