Tendring Topics......on Line
Recycling
Recycling has, for many years, been one of my enthusiasms. At one time I had three compost bins in which I converted every scrap of kitchen and garden waste into compost. I had a shredder that made my tree and shrub prunings compostable. Seaweed harvested from Clacton ’s beaches enriched the contents of my bins! Some of my used newspapers, soaked in water, I would use to line trenches destined to be filled with compost and grow sweet peas or runner beans or courgettes. I was very proud of the results!
Sadly, my gardening days came to an end but I was pleased when Tendring Council introduced its recycling collection service. I conscientiously sort out my newspapers, magazines, circulars, plastic bottles and empty food and drink cans, put them in the green box that the council provided and put it, together with the black plastic bag containing non-recyclable refuse, at the entrance to my driveway on the appropriate day of every week.
Had I been asked how the service could be improved I would have suggested including glass bottles and jars to the recyclables. There are a number of bottle banks in the area (I am fortunate in having one less than a quarter of a mile away) but jars and bottles are heavy and bulky for a pedestrian or cyclist to carry and using a car to make the journey surely defeats the purpose of the exercise. I take my bottles and jars on my mobility scooter when I have to make an occasional visit to Magdalen Green Post Office, very near the bottle bank.
Tendring Council launched last week its new and improved recyclables collection scheme. Its purpose is to separate papers and card from potentially contaminating plastic milk and household domestic cleaning bottles, and to add the collection of food waste (leftovers, vegetable peelings and so on). For this last purpose householders are provided with two containers – a small plastic ‘caddy’ to keep in the kitchen for the immediate reception of waste, and a larger storage bin, with hinged lid, to be kept outside and to receive the contents of the caddy. The larger of these bins will be emptied every week into the collecting vehicle and should be put out on the boundary of the property, at the same time as the black plastic bag containing non-recyclable refuse,
Every household has also been issued with a red salvage box. This is to be used, with the green box we already possess, to separate the recyclable materials. The red box is to be used for paper and cardboard only and the green one for metal cans of all descriptions and plastic bottles (milk bottles and bottles used for bleach and other household cleaning materials – not for yoghurt pots or containers used for margarine, cheese or other spreads, and salad vegetables or fruit) The filled red box and the filled green box are to be put out for the collectors on alternate weeks and we have all been given a little calendar showing clearly which box is to be collected each week.
Thus, if everything goes according to plan, on ‘collection day’ outside each house there will be the black plastic sack containing unrecyclable refuse, a green storage bin with a hinged lid for food and kitchen waste and either a red or a green box with the other recyclables.
It will rarely be exactly like that. I realize that, living on my own, eating frozen or ready-prepared food, and preparing no more than I need for each meal, I have very little kitchen and food waste. A few teabags, half a dozen egg shells and two or three banana skins are likely to comprise my weekly harvest! There must be other ’live-aloners’ in a similar position. Some householders, I have little doubt, will ignore the entire scheme. They will never use their plethora of boxes and will simply leave outside all their refuse, unsorted, in two or more black plastic sacks!
The scheme is a bit complicated, but most of us I think, will try to co-operate. I can see one snag (presumably the result of the Council’s spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar!) that may cause a serious problem. Our existing green boxes have lids. The new red boxes do not. The red boxes are used for paper and cardboard. Many householders will keep these boxes outside and put cardboard and unwanted paper in them throughout the fortnight. We all put out our refuse and recyclables for collection at least an hour or so before the collectors arrive. There will thus be plenty of time for high winds to scatter loose paper from the open red boxes, or for heavy rain to to reduce paper and cardboard in them to a soggy mass!
There is one simple and straight-forward solution that would not cost the Council a penny. Swap the purposes of the two boxes, using the green one for paper and cardboard, and the red one for cans and plastic bottles. The lid would protect paper and cardboard in the green box from wind and rain while the weather would have little effect on bottles and cans in the open red box.
I wonder if the Council will be prepared to admit that they got it wrong – and will put it right.
"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."
When, many years ago, I was a POW in a small working camp in Germany , we had a tear-off calendar in our ‘barrack room’ with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for each day. The quotation above, from the German poet Schiller is one of two or three of them that I have remembered to this day. It means ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain’.
That quotation came into my mind when, a fortnight ago, I commented in this blog on the Prime Minister’s and Cabinet Office Minister’s success in turning the mole-hill of a possible future strike of petrol lorry drivers into a mountain of chaos, bad temper and potential danger when they advised motorists to keep their vehicles topped up with petrol and the Cabinet Office Minister suggested keeping a jerrican or two of petrol in reserve in the garage! One of their cabinet colleagues had the effrontery to say later that as a result of their advice to motorists we were better prepared for any possible strike than we had been!
A regular correspondent points out that if there had been an imminent strike, the advice would have been every bit as idiotic and even more reprehensible. If we are ever faced with a petrol shortage he hopes that someone in authority will strongly advise ‘don’t dash out and top up your petrol tank’. If everyone panic-buys the situation will become infinitely worse. Think of ways you can use less petrol or avoid using it altogether. Walk the children to school instead of driving them. It’s healthier anyway. Where you can, walk or cycle to your work or other destination. Share your vehicle with others. Use public transport. Consider, as we were all asked to consider during World War II, ‘Is your journey really necessary?’
That way there should be sufficient petrol for essential services – fire and ambulance for example – and for essential journeys by the rest of us. But I suppose no-one can expect politicians, who rarely open their mouths without considering whether what they are about to say will gain votes or lose them, to give sensible advice like that.
At the time of the politician-induced crisis I was amused by a report in a National newspaper of a pub with a sign outside ‘Beer Shortage – come in and panic-buy!’
Health and Safety
We have all become accustomed to idiotic restrictions like schools forbidding children from playing conkers, popular play equipment being removed from children’s playgounds and so on, being imposed in the interests of ‘health and safety’. Adults lives too are likely to be similarly plagued. I have heard that there are offices where employees are forbidden to hang their coats over the backs of their chairs because someone had once tripped and fallen over just such a coat!
Much the same motive lies behind the dire warning enclosed with some proprietary packets of sleeping pills; ‘These may cause drowsiness’. I wonder that no-one has yet thought of fencing off the sea. Even those who escape drowning may get their feet wet and develop pneumonia!
The cause of all this pernicious interference with everyone’s daily life is not, as you may imagine, some overzealous bureaucrat in Whitehall (or possibly in Brussels) who devotes his life to creating regulations that make everyone else’s life miserable. On the contrary it is a product of free enterprise, of the market place and of the carefully fostered conviction that there is no such thing as a genuine accident – every unpleasant thing that happens to anyone is the result of someone else’s carelessness or neglect, and that someone must be made to pay for it.
Conkers are forbidden in some school playgrounds because there is a remote possibility that one of the conkers might fly off its restraining string and injure a participant or onlooker. Sue the school for failing to exercise adequate control in the playground! A child falls off a recreation ground slide or swing and twists an ankle. Sue the Council for installing dangerous equipment! A motorist takes a couple of pain-killers and crashes his car. Was he warned that the pills could cause drowsiness? No? then sue the drug company or the pharmacist who sold them!
Don’t look in Whitehall or in Brussels for those responsible for attempting to eliminate every possible peril (and several that one might have thought impossible) from modern life. Just switch on your tv set and watch daytime commercial tv for an hour or so. You won’t have long to wait for a benign character to appear on the screen telling you that if you have been involved in an accident and it isn’t your fault, the chances are that you’ll be entitled to compensation. Get in touch forthwith with this, that or the other firm of solicitors. They’re specialists and they’ll get you every penny of the compensation to which you are entitled. It’s no win, no fee, and the ‘other lot’ will have to pay all legal costs!
It isn’t the bureaucrats, or even the politicians, who have created and fostered the excesses of ‘Health and Safety’. It is our own compensation culture and the legal vultures who make their own fortunes out of it.
The Local Elections
Tendring District residents will not have a vote in the forthcoming local council elections because we elect the members of our council all together in a local general election. It is electors in areas where a third of the members of their Council are elected annually who will be exercising their right to vote early next month.
Needless to say the national party leaders are having their say, often with old, stale platitudes that we have heard a dozen times before. I am a little tired of David Cameron’s explanation of all that is wrong with Britain today as the result of ‘The financial mess that we inherited from the previous Labour Government’, especially when no less an authority than the Governor of the Bank of England has made clear again and again that the cause of that financial mess was the greed and incompetence of the bankers – to a man (and woman) enthusiastic supporters of Mr Cameron’s party.
I am very interested in the steady progress of the Green Party. They already have a majority of voters in Brighton and it wouldn’t need a very big electoral swing in their direction to give them a majority in Norwich and elsewhere. I note that that among their policies, ranking equally with what we generally think of as ‘Green’ issues, is the urgent need to narrow the enormous gap between the incomes of Britain ’s wealthiest and its poorest citizens.
Regular blog readers will know that this is a cause that has my unqualified support. Last week I suggested that the time might be right to launch a new political party with that specific aim. I suggested that it might be called The New Levellers but a blog reader in whose judgement I have the greatest confidence suggests The Equality Party. I would be perfectly happy with that. In the meantime; I would unhesitatingly support any party working towards narrowing that ever-widening gap, the cause of so many of our nation’s ills.
For that reason I wish every success to Green local government candidates throughout the land!
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