Re: "This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today."

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007 13:58:28 +0100, Vinny Burgoo
<hlunnh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In alt.usage.english, Mike Page wrote:
On Wed, 30 May 2007 18:47:54 +0100, Peter Duncanson

Burning books is "bad". It puts yet more CO2 into the atmosphere.
The paper should be recycled.

In the increasingly authoritarian and fascistic European Union our
local government bodies with responsibility for waste/trash
collection are fined if they do not collect and recycle everything
that can be recycled.

I think the point is that they are not allowed to dump it in land
fill.

That's right. In one-size-fits-all Europe, everyone has to deal with
their waste in the same approved fashion. So we'll probably never see
dust carts powered by electricity generated at landfill sites by burning
methane.

It's all box-ticking and targeteering. It's all rubbish.

[1] Most of our 'recycled waste' from domestic collections,
including all of the paper, is incinerated.

Not so. Most of the paper collected from houses for recycling used to go
straight into landfill. These days some of it is actually recycled.
There was a piece on the telly only the other day about a large
domestic-paper-recycling plant. I'm sure some is incinerated, but
certainly not all.

We could argue about the proportion being incinerated, but I
meant to add 'our' before 'domestic' above. It's definitely the
case that Southampton's rubbish is incinerated - I got a senior
councillor to admit this, but the council is very coy about
telling people since it doesn't seem 'green' and might put people
off using the enormous blue lidded wheelie bins (emptied every
fortnight, if they can be bothered) that sit next to the enormous
green lidded wheelie bins in most people's front gardens.


.... I take the bottles to the
dump every month or two, the beer cans go straight in the bin and I burn
the paper and cardboard - in the ancient kitchen range if I can be
arsed, so it helps to heat the water, but usually outside. It's
enormously satisfying burning junk mail. Everyone should do it.

We shred the junk mail and mix it in with the compost, but we
still have tons of newspaper to go in the wheelie bin.


And another thing - the huge green wheelie bin issued for the collection
of garden and kitchen waste has never been fully emptied and has been
partly emptied only twice in two years. It's big enough to hold a
Christmas tree but I only put chicken carcasses, egg shells and the odd
hunk of stale bread in there - not much but it builds up over the
months. There's currently a foot and a half of stinky mould in the
bottom of the thing. I don't blame the bin men. It's the system that's
wrong. Country people don't need a huge bin for garden waste. And if
they're organised - which I'm not - all uncooked food scraps can be
composted without attracting rats.

Not around here, meat scraps and mouldy root veg is likely to
attract the tree hamsters.


[1] With rising sea levels I should have thought strategically
dumped rubbish could be used in sea defences.

Neat idea! Let's ship it all to the Maldives.

Not such a bad idea perhaps. But we'll need our own sea defences
soon.


--
Mike Page
Who has a space after the two dashes in his
sig. separator, honest.
.