It’s finally happened, folks. In Scotland at least, rubbish is no longer a practical problem, but a moral issue.
This is hardly an overnight transformation. Ever since rubbish and recycling became locked together, garbage has been a hot button topic in council chambers, over the garden fence and at dinner tables. How to collect it? How to dispose of it? How to wage war against it? Families row about it.
My only certainty is that rubbish is an area of creeping officiousness — and this worries me far more than litter louts in Tranent. Litter louts are a pain in the neck, but so are council officials.
Borrowing a friend’s house last year, most of the do’s and don’ts of the house concerned rubbish. The rules went something like this. We must put plastic bottles into the purple container. Glossy magazines went in a yellow box, which had to be transported several miles to a glossy paper point. Bottles must be divided by colour, disregarding the fact that when the bin men came they would just tip them into one big bucket. Never mind. And strictly no soil in any bucket. Soil was hazardous waste and must go into a big red box. Our friend was more worried about the bins, over which she could be fined by the council, than she was about the burglar alarm.
At the back of my mind, a question lurked. Is recycling really all it’s cracked up to be? Back in 1996, there was a furious response to a piece in The New York Times by John Tierney, who suggested that the boom in recycling in America was a hysterical reaction to the wanderings of an infamous garbage barge named Mobro 4000 as it searched for somewhere to dump the rubbish spewed out by Long Islanders.
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Yet, as Tierney pointed out, there are some difficulties with the recycling arguments. Recycling uses up much more energy than landfill. It often involves rubbish being transported over longer distances. If it cannot be transformed into things people actually want to buy, it can produce great gluts of paper, glass and plastic, with which something has to be done. Exactly how environmentally friendly are those pencils that say “I used to be a pair of blue jeans” if the material to make them has had to be exported to China? Recycling might work well for aluminium cans, which use less energy to recycle than manufacturing aluminium cans from bauxite, but when McDonald’s was pressured into swapping its polystyrene packaging for paperboard, which people hailed as self-evidently good recycling sense, there was more to it than that. Polystyrene is completely recyclable, but paper cups are not. Moreover, the old polystyrene hamburger shells not only used less energy to produce than paperboard, but also produced less pollution.
In this country we have taken to recycling, and although I believe we should resist the easy philosophy of “I recycle, therefore I care”, I am happy to buy into the whole clamjamfrey. It makes me feel better.
But let’s stop the bullying. Rubbish may be a moral issue, but we don’t pay a zillion pounds a year in council tax for a morality lesson or so that council officials can issue us with long lists of threats. Councils have spotted new ways of increasing revenue by fining those who put the “wrong kind of rubbish” in street bins. There is even talk of rationing rubbish.
It is a council’s duty to collect the garbage, particularly garbage in the street. To make the lives of the majority miserable because of the behaviour of a minority of mindless litter louts is as bad as being a litter lout yourself.
If the garbage collectors of East Lothian feel they are being taken for granted, that’s because they are. And quite properly so. Like the rest of us, they are simply doing the job for which they are paid. If there was no rubbish, they’d be unemployed and in need of recycling themselves.