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 |  Subject: Statist Insanity: Trash getting harder to throw away in Britain  Fri Jun 27, 2008 12:35 am | |
| WHITEHAVEN, England: The citizens of Whitehaven try. Really they do. They separate their cans, their paper, their cardboard and their glass, and they recycle them all. They compost. They jump up and down on their trash to cram it into their government-issued garbage cans, and they put the trash out for collection at exactly 7 a.m., twice a month.
But when Gareth Corkhill, a bus driver, was fined £110, or $216 - and given a further £115 fine and a criminal record when he failed to pay - for leaving his garbage can lid slightly ajar this spring, the coastal town banded together in dismay. People raised money to pay the fine, and they began to complain.
"I consider the fine against Mr. Corkhill to be a matter of injustice, really, and as a Christian minister I'm required to speak out against injustice," declared the Reverend John Bannister, the rector of Whitehaven.
Referring to the garbage cans that residents here use, he said: "To be given a criminal record for leaving your wheelie bin open by three inches has, I think, really gone beyond the bounds of responsible behavior." Three inches is 7.6 centimeters.
Across Europe, residents are struggling to adjust to a new era of garbage rules. Britain, particularly, is in the midst of a trash crisis, with dwindling landfill space and one of the poorest recycling records in Europe. Threatened with steep fines if they dump too much trash, local governments around the country are imposing strict rules to force residents to produce less and recycle more.
Many now collect trash every other week, instead of every week. They limit the amount of a household's garbage and refuse to pick up more. They require that garbage be put out only at specific times; reject whole boxes of recyclables that contain the odd nonrecyclable item; and employ enforcement officers who issue warnings and impose fines for failure to comply.
Few people could argue that in an era of dwindling environmental resources, it is essential that garbage-heavy societies like Britain change their ways.
"These are challenging times, and the U.K. is behind the game when it comes to relying on landfills," said Beverley Parr, a spokeswoman for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Or, as Ian Curwen, a spokesman for Copeland Borough Council, which encompasses Whitehaven, said: "Ultimately as a country, we have to do more - we can't just keep producing and throwing things away."
But Britons don't like being told what to do. Encouraged by anti-government newspapers, they particularly object when the government meddles, as they see it, in such intimate matters as the contents of their garbage cans.
As regulations get more stringent and enforcement more robust, there have been reports across the country of incensed residents shouting and throwing trash at garbage collectors, illegally dumping and burning excess garbage and even surreptitiously tossing trash in neighbors' garbage cans or stealing those cans.
"It's like something out of 'Mad Max,"' Paul Nicholls, a resident of Cannock, near Birmingham, told The Guardian newspaper recently, describing the free-for-all in his town at garbage-collection time. "Every man for himself, scavenging for an extra bin."
The government says the new regulations are necessary if Britain, known in trash circles as "the dustbin of Europe," is to adjust to the changing times. Along with the rest of Europe, Britain has been ordered to reduce the amount of waste it puts in landfills - by 2015 to 50 percent of what it was in 1995 - or face untold millions of dollars in European Union fines.
That means that people have to rethink completely their relationship to their refuse, said Paul Bettison, chairman of the environment board of the Local Government Association.
"It's a sad thing to have to shatter people's illusions," Bettison said, "but gone are the days when we could put all our rubbish and junk in a big bag and overnight the fairy would come and take it away, and that would be the end of it. The rubbish fairy is dead."
The twice-a-month collection routine, now in use in more than half the country, is particularly unpopular and became a contentious issue in the recent local elections, in which the governing Labour Party was trounced by its opponents. Among other things, said Doretta Cocks, who runs the 22,000-member Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, having infrequent collections creates a health hazard, what with the smell, the maggots and the rats.
"It's supposed to be environmentally friendly, but it's not," Cocks said. "How can it be environmentally friendly to have two weeks' worth of rubbish in your house?"
Whitehaven provides many of its homeowners with an array of recycling cans as well as government-regulation wheelie cans - similar to those used behind supermarkets - that are often modest in size.
Into these they are expected to stuff the garbage they produce in two weeks.
"My bin's always full," said a 62-year-old Whitehaven resident, who says that he can get five bags in there if he jumps on them vigorously enough.
He is engaged in a running battle with the garbage collectors. He once put an extra bag of trash on top of his can; they refused to pick it up and left the garbage from the now-ripped bag strewn on the street. He once failed to close his can properly and received a "nasty note saying it was overloaded," he said.
The note was followed by a sticker of shame affixed to the bin announcing that he was violating the garbage laws. The man, who asked that his name not be used because he was afraid of running afoul of the authorities, said he now regularly takes his extra trash to an empty field and burns it.
Parr, the environment spokeswoman, said that in 1997, Britain recycled just 7 percent of its waste, compared with 33 percent now. The country is poised to experiment with programs under which localities would offer families "financial incentives for reducing waste," she said. In other words, households would pay according to how much garbage they threw out, just as they pay for resources like water according to how much they use.
Under one plan, people's garbage cans would be fitted with microchips, enabling local councils to record the weight or volume of garbage per household. Although such cans are used already in other European countries, even the prospect has critics in Britain muttering about Big Brother and creeping taxation.
"There's a security concern, and there's also a concern that whilst the idea of pay-as-you-use works well in principle, local councils do not behave like the rest of the economy, and you won't see your council tax go down," said Mark Wallace, national spokesman for the Taxpayers Alliance, a group that lobbies for lower taxes.
In Whitehaven, the residents are annoyed enough about the rules they already have.
Claire Corkhill, whose husband received the fine for their open can, is still recovering from the indignity of having two uniformed garbage-enforcement officers, or "garbage police," as they are known locally, show up at her house.
"They were wearing stab vests," she said. "My sister is a police officer, so we thought it was a joke, to be honest."
Curwen, the local council spokesman, said the Corkhills had failed to respond to several warnings.
"They got a sticker, and then a letter, and then another letter saying, 'Would you like us to come round and discuss your waste situation with you, because we need to reduce our landfilling and the fines are quite steep?"' he said.
Curwen said that people in similar situations - unable to close their cans because of too much garbage - should telephone the council. "We can give you tips on recycling and reducing waste," he said.
And Bettison, of the Local Government Association, said that there would always be some people who needed extra prodding.
"To encourage people to do something, you start off by asking them 'please,"' he said. "Then you say 'pretty please.'
"But if they don't respond to carrots, you have to move a little more along the scale that has carrots on one end and sticks on the other. You have to make it a little more difficult for them not to recycle."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/25/europe/journal.php |
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