Plastic Surprise!
16/04/07 14:35 | Personal
bin collection
It has been a while since I last wrote anything to do with the environment or re-cycling, mainly because I am fed up with the hijacking of the subject by self righteous politicians. Yes, we all know that global warming is a reality but even the scientists cannot reach agreement on how harmful it could be and being an MP and being seen on TV riding a bicycle does not even begin to solve the problem. There is no single cause to global warming and it is as much down to the natural demands of the massive increase in the world's population as it is to do with manufacturing and the like.

No politician is ever going to be brave enough to tell us to reduce the population, so instead, we get our local councils sending us another plastic bin to allow us to take part in a fortnightly collection: one week for re-cyclable rubbish and the next for household. It is a one size fits all solution to the problem they have been given of meeting their re-cycling targets.

I have always been conscious of the need to try to re-cycle and to that end I visit my local centre often but I was shocked the other day when I took a boot load of plastic bottles which I had been diligently collecting only to find they did not have the means to process them. The nearest centre that could handle the task was 40 miles away.

Given that a huge number of families now drink bottled water and get their milk in plastic containers, it seems strange that rather than trying to re-cycle these items, the council were still going to put them in the landfill. I could have re-cycled asbestos, wood, car batteries, tv's or almost anything else but plastic. How ironic it now seems, that the new bin being sent by the council is made of that material.

One can only wonder at how much pollution was produced in the manufacture of the millions of bins being distributed throughout the UK!
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