Those of you who faithfully follow your local council's diktats wrt sorting your rubbish into various categories, or those of you who have been fined for throwing a crisp packet in with the paper may have enjoyed Monday night's Tonight programme on ITV.
Tonight revealed that we are being conned by our councils when they tell us that our rubbish is recycled.
The Tonight investigation revealed that waste, originally collected for recycling by four British local authorities, is being dumped on Indian farmland near the migration path of wild elephants.
Tonight reporter Mark Jordan travelled to the state of Tamil Nadu and found waste including British newspapers DATED FROM THIS JANUARY, food packaging from Tesco, plastic bags from Mothercare and even a St George's flag.
After digging down four feet with a JCB at one well site, Tonight discovered a hidden mountain of British waste including Walkers crisps bags, Sainsbury's apple juice, children's report cards and newspapers such as The Telegraph. It is estimated that the well could be up to 30 feet deep.
Tonight tracked down supposedly recycled mail found at one Indian dump addressed to residents living in Tendring, Wellingborough and Wakefield District Councils and Leicestershire County Council.
All four authorities collect recyclables intermingled in either one or two bins then send them to a sorting facility which will sell them on to be recycled in factories or mills.
A Tonight survey also showed that 46 local authorities HAVE NO IDEA what happens to their household collections of recyclable waste, after it is sent to their contracted sorting facilities.
Am I alone in feeling a tad "miffed" to discover that my council tax increases (part of which are allegedly being used for environmental purposes) and the draconian punishments handed down to "bin criminals" are in fact an elaborate cover for local authorities merely to raise more revenue and con us into thinking that we are doing something good for the environment, whilst they take a little extra slice from dodgy deals with dodgy recycling companies?
Who trusts our local councils now?
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A side effect of the EUSSR!!.....Councils, well us really, are charged by the EUSSR a landfill tax which means, for every ton of rubbish that is put into landfill, the EUSSR charge us £32, this means we pay money to dump our own rubbish in our own landfill to a group of unelected foreigners. From next year, the price per ton is set to rise to between £100 and £150....Who will pay for that...Well us of course!!
ReplyDeleteGiving local council officials, especially binmen, power is a sure fire recipe for disaster.....Councils appear to gleefully follow each and every diktat from Euro Nanny no matter how daft or illogical they are.....They appear to adopt the jobsworth approach of "Rules are rules and MUST be obeyed."
I have thought about what Lord of Atlantis and Number Six said on the previous thread and, following a timely DVD and written newsletter being put through my letterbox by UKIP this morning, I have decided to vote for UKIP at the next opportunity.
We need to rescue our country from the EUSSR....It seems ironical that, at a time when every other nation seems to accept socialism and communism is always a failure, we are heading blindly towards such a superstate modeled on one or both of the said ideologies.
My MP, John Redwood, is a good local MP and a Eurosceptic but, I do not believe Mr Cameron is so Eurosceptic and I cannot see him reducing the EUSSR's power and influence over my country. I just hope that there is a backlash against the EUSSR and our politicians that embrace it so enthusiastically and that people power will save our nation but, I won't hold my breath.
God Save The Queen!!
It's funny, that unless we use an approved waste contractor to get rid, of say - building rubble, we could be fined and proscuted for fly tipping. It's obviously ok for the council to wash their hands of our waste and live in blissful ignorance, just not us.
ReplyDeleteTonk, again you see the hand of the EU that seems to be invisible to all the media and our quisling politicians.
ReplyDeleteI will bang the UKIP drum again, we have all this up on our website.
Until we leave the EU there will be no end to this idiocy.
Very interesting post. A similar discovery was made by a journalist in Germany soon after fines for incorrect rubbish disposal were introduced there. He found that all of the nicely separated rubbish was, in fact, being tipped into the same hole in a land fill site in Germany. Exporting your rubbish is a new wheeze. It is also interesting to note that none of the very energetic entreprenurs that the sub continent abounds in has shown any interest in in re-cycling this imported rubbish. If there was money to be made from doing so I am positive someone would have taken up the opportunity. Yet more evidence that the whole greenie recycling issue is a giant and expensive scam.
ReplyDeleteMCO
It's unbelievable that British waste is being transported to be dumped in INDIA - presumably in ships or planes which contribute to atmospheric pollution and global warming.
ReplyDeleteAs for UKIP, whether we like it or not the EU is here to stay, and our only realistic choice is to pitch in there and get it working less bureaucratically [if we are still capable of that!] or to become even more of a USA satellite, which IMHO is the worst option.
anticant said...
ReplyDelete" It's unbelievable that British waste is being transported to be dumped in INDIA - presumably in ships or planes which contribute to atmospheric pollution and global warming."
Atmospheric pollution - well, maybe a little but declining as people seek greater efficiencies and even now far less than 100 years ago from all industrial sources it seems.
Global Warming? Not in my view.
Ships will be used - it has been known for some years that contianer loads of waste have been shipped to the Far East for 're-processing'.
How is it economic?
Well, once the container ships have off loaded the manufactured goods and produce from the Far East there is naff all to go back. The cost of sailing an empty container ship is not much less than sailing a loaded one sonce the containers have to circulate anyway, full or empty. So any revenue is worth having. It's not unlike the tale of the Irishman who landed a contract to cart site waste away from a road building project one day and another contract to fill a big hole just down the road on the next. Not difficult to make money on that basis.
In the middle of the sea routes is India, a country that has some of the poorest people in the world but also many of the richest, very many of whom have made their billions in shipping and related businesses - like Steel for example.
These guys know a thing or two about waste. When a ship reaches the end of its useful life - 20 to 30 years of plying the world's oceans, it may well be sent to Bangladesh for dismantling.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/locations/ship-breaking.shtml
Such is the economic pyramid that we operate around.
Looking on the bright side I have now realised that my local 'recyclables' collections, whilst apparently strictly regulated as to what can and cannot by recycled (especially for 'plastics') seem happy enough to take anything so long as it is not in the wrong bin or bag - though one can ignore the bags for paper and card waste (so long as separated). My wife buys those 'Bag for Life' things in order to have something of suitable strength to chuck out 2 weeks worth of newspapers and junk mail. They usually take the content and the bag for us.
If the 'success' of a recycling scheme is based on weight (which I guess it is) and separation is in fact not really an issue then anything that can be lugged to the weighbridge will add to the 'success'.
Presumably that is why they recently started to collect glass ...
Grant
Anticant,
ReplyDeleteIt is attitudes like yours, the whinging Brit "what can we do about it" that have got us into this mess with the EU.
Perhaps our grandparents and parents could have said "like it or not Nazi Germany is here to stay, so best get on with dealing with it."
They saw a creeping totalitarian state and dealt with it we must do the same with the EU. Hopefully, we will not have to resort to guns and bombs.
Number 6 - if anyone is a "whingeing Brit" it is you. As someone who grew up during WW2 - when you probably weren't born - I know, better than you do, what my parents' and older brothers' generation did to defeat Hitler.
ReplyDeleteYou obviously don't know much history. Most of the appeasers who liked the Nazis in the 1930s were extreme right-wing idiots who thought Hitler was providing a "Christian bulwark" against communism. Read "Fellow Travellers of the Right" by Richard Griffiths.
Churchill - who with hindsight is now everyone's hero - was in a lonely minority against these people. I'm glad to say my family were among those who supported him. The Left, who opposed fascism verbally but opposed rearmament, were [as they usually are] utterly useless.
And please remember that Churchill was the most prominent advocate of a United Europe in the immediate postwar years.
If you really believe that getting out of the EU would make BRITISH governments any less Nannyish, you would believe anything. If hating the EU is your thing, by all means whinge away - but preferably not on this otherwise sensible site!
"The right bag"? In the early days of this recycling caper, we had separate street bins side by side for white, brown and green bottles. Fine - but then we noticed the binmen coming along and tipping the contents of all three bins indiscriminately into the same refuse cart.
ReplyDeleteAnticant,
ReplyDeleteThank you for taking the time to reply to my comment. I fail to see the bearing that one's age has on understanding history and current affairs. As to your family's participation in WWII I salute them and indeed my own for their truly valiant efforts. I will not brag about the service my grandfather and father carried out, medals won etc.
Now, for your information. I am fully aware of Churchill's initial support for a 'united Europe' this was of course (far be from me to lecture a man of your advanced age and wisdom) totally removed from the current statist system of the EU. Right wing appeasers - typified by Mosley and the Mitfords were, naturally appalling deluded traitors, the left as useless as ever, although perhaps some such as Orwell (you may have heard of him in his capacity as a writer, again I would not wish to patronise your undoubted worldly wise vision) did actually take up arms in the Spanish Civil War to attempt to head off the fascist/nazi movement in Europe.
I do not whinge - if any other contributors to this fine blog feel that I do by all means let me know - I believe I state a point of view on the EU that some share,some have come around too and some (such as yourself) disagree with. That is the point of a blog.
You, on the other hand, advocate a 'what can we do about it' attitude. While we are on a historical bent perhaps you would have approved of such right wing figures as M Thatcher and Mr Reagan taking that same view about the Soviet Union?
Finally, your "I was almost in the war for you sonny is attitude is quite amusing.
I don't claim that age gives me any superior wisdom or knowledge, number 6 - although I am a historian by training and have written some history besides making it in a small way. But I do think that when you are born makes a difference to how you comprehend the times you live through, in contrast to what happened before.
ReplyDeleteFor instance the first world war is just history to me, whereas it was all too real to my parents and grandparents, who had lived through all its horrors and lost so many of their generation in the trenches. That experience, I believe, explains in large part the reluctance of many to stand up to Hitler when he first appeared - they were still suffering from war weariness.
Please don't put words into my mouth, or be sneeringly patronising. Orwell, as a matter of fact, is one of my favourite authors.
All I am saying is that I don't think Ken's blog is the right place to debate the pros and cons of the EU and UKIP. And I don't for a moment believe that most of the Nannyish excesses we rightly castigate here emanate from the EU and it's silly to claim that they do.
OMG!
ReplyDeleteI go out for the day, come back, and you two are still fighting. Where did that A-Z of Good Parenting go?
I must admit Number 6, you do make many contributions to this site - most of them variations on the theme: “I used to vote Conservative but now I vote UKIP”. It’s also fair to say that whinging is pretty much the motive force behind 90% of any comments that appear here (We don’t hear much from cramerj these days, but I was surprised he never said: “You whinging Poms don’t you ever stop!”).
However, you seem to come across more of a doer than a whinger.
IMHO, most comments on this site can be placed on a scale running from ‘reason & logic’ on one side, to ‘blind-emotion & abuse’ on the other, with an orthogonal whinge scale on the Y-axis. That’s then coupled with the common trait of only seeing one side of an argument.
Blotting out the other side of the argument usually leads to a more-entertaining, amusing and satisfying blog, but it removes any force the argument might otherwise have.
I too enjoy your wisdom and experience Anticant, especially the fact that you seem to be the type who’ll happily say “No”, rather than run with the mob.
On the EU issue though, for something so humongously important for the sovereignty and future of this country, the attitude of: “whether we like it or not the EU is here to stay, and our only realistic choice ....” just doesn’t (with all due respect) cut the mustard.
My Dear Anticant,
ReplyDeleteI am afraid that the 'nannyish' tnedencies we all deplore and have been debating via Ken's blog do emenate from the EU. For example, bin taxes, human rights (used to stop us deporting know terrorists to such bastions of evil as the USA)HIPS, soon to herald in an EU wide carbon tax on private homes, the closure of post offices due to EU diktats about funding from national government etc etc.
You argue your points about post WWI involvement in European politics due to the age of the people involved with reason. I should ask you to look into the involvement of the EU into our current lives and then draw your own conclusions about its influence before castigating me for bringing the issue of the ultimate nanny state (EU) into the debate on a blog dedicated to exposing and hopefully disabling such nannyism.
Respectfully,
Number 6
When I said "the EU is here to stay" I didn't mean the UK doesn't have the option to leave - I think we should have the promised referendum this government is too cowardly to hold. Sorry not to have made that clear.
ReplyDeleteWhat I meant was that whether we stay in or leave, I doubt whether the EU will collapse or change course as a result of our decision and I think it would be better for us to muck in, clean up the corruption, and inject more common sense and less bureaucracy into its proceedings.
We might at least be able to modify its defects, whereas if we sit sulking on the sidelines we shall inevitably get drawn further into the orbit of the tottering US colossus - a 'Titanic' disaster in the making which we would do well to steer clear of.
UKIP's policy seems to me honourable but as impractical as Beaverbrook's 1930s Empire Free Trade campaign was.
I should add that our most urgent need is a sensible, unNannyish government in this country but I don't see much prospect of one, as the Conservatives are almost as bad as New Labour in this respect.
ReplyDeleteIve taken up fly tipping, its actually great fun, gets me out in the evenings and cuts down on so much hassel on bin day, ahh look of pride and joy on my family's face as we watch the bin slaves pushing their seperated rubbish out every thursday.
ReplyDeleteExpect to see many more of me in the future, but dont worry your tax will pay to clear it up.
I'm also going to sign on soon and have a job on the side, selling drugs.
Again your taxes will pay for a social worker to help me....cos its all Maggies fault
Anticant,
ReplyDeleteAlas, I fear attempting to reform the EU (a corrupt self serving political construct set up to benefit nobody but, well, politicians) is akin to attempting to reforming the Mafia.
Bear in mind the EU has not produced balanced accounts for 13 (count em) 13 years - where has all the millions taken in tax gone? No one knows - although I suspect arch EU gravy train riders such as Kinnock and Mandy might have some idea. If this was any other organisation or indeed political party massive questions would be asked - or in the private sector fruad and jail terms woould be discussed.
I believe in my country and that we can make it in the big bad world without the EU and leaving that hole does not automatically mean being subsumed by the US.
You seem to have a knee jerk reaction against the US (a trait shared by Graundiad readers and various so called 'liberals') but having lived there for 10 years I can assure you they take the concept of democracy far more seriously than we do and would certainly never allow another country or state to dictate laws within her own borders, as we do with our 'membership' of the EU.
Anon,
ReplyDeleteThanks for replying. I do not believe Anticnat and I are fighting, merely debating respective viewpoints via Ken's excellent blog.
I believe in nailing one's political colours to the mast and debating vigorously. I think this is the first time that I have actually mentioned that I previously voted Tory.
As 70percent of our laws emenate from the EU, including their hidden hand in all of the much hated nanny laws from bin tax, via what seeds we can plant in our gardens etc I believe an anti-nanny state blog is the perfect place to debate the EU's nanny control freakery.
I don't have a kneejerk reaction against the US - I've known many generous and warmhearted Americans - but I have more than just a kneejerk reaction against the corrupt immoral crew currently running the place, and get the strong impression that great masses of American voters, well intentioned though they may be, are far too complacently ignorant of the wider world to ensure better government for themselves and sounder leadership for the world.
ReplyDeleteWould you deny that for the past decade at least - and probably longer - the USA has lost its moral compass and committed dreadful blunders internationally? Do you see any prospect of that changing soon? I'm afraid I don't.
If you want a patriotic American Republican's assessment of their own country, read Yankee Doodle's very impressive blog.
Anticant,
ReplyDeleteThe current 'corrupt' government of the USA can be voted out (as can current corrupt useless senators via voter recall, even while they are still in office) the current corrupt government that runs Britain - the EU - cannot be voted out at all at no time.
Hence, my view that the nanny state cannot be removed until we remove ourselves from the EU.
Anticat, I respectfully would like to inform you that your arguements make absolutely no sense.
ReplyDelete