Eco Backlash. I hate the fucking recycling.
Life just isn't long enough to sort the mountains of household litter into PET, PPE, waxed foot cartons and whatever else you just bought in Tesco today.
Uncontent with the good old galvanised dustbin, the city council (pregnant with the news that the old scheme of dumping waste into a big pit off the A40 and calling it landfill was bollocks), passed the buck. Leaving us with a bizarre range of technicolor plastic crates which vary wildly according to your post code.
Yea, it looks pretty simple on the leaflets, plastic in the blue, paper in the green...I mean, you could train a monkey to do this with a bag of peanuts and a long weekend, or so you'd have thought.
Unfortunately this is the age of composites. And as I peel the plastic film window off the polystyrene wrapper of yet another free DVD thats landed on the doormat it occurs to me that something is horribly wrong. I read some New Scientist feature about how DVDs were stronger (and less bio-degradable) than the thermal tiles on a NASA shuttle. Odd then that they seem to go so wacko when they get even SLIGHTLY scratched, I think, dropping the whole lot into the wheelie-bin that still accounts for 60% of my household waste.
As if this wasn't bad enough, Nityanand Jayaraman followed the contents of a UK recycling crate which finished up in a landfill site somewhere outside Tamil Nadu, India (1) ,where I bet there are armies of barefoot kids just desperate to play skittles with your Brillo pads and used ToiletDucks.
Ok, ok but what the FUCK else do we do with it? I hear you ask. Well... get out there and use your initiative you council-tax paying bastards.
Kudos to the street kids of Barnsley who started a trend in wheelie-bin parties (2). Just half-inch a bin, spark it up with a splash of diesel and hold your head in it until you pass out! Wordup Barnsley! I respect anyone who can have that much fun with a dustbin. For the less hardcore I reckon there's still a lot of fun to be had out of the plastic crates. They're not bad as emergency garden furniture and they're just the right size for storing records.
Even the Daily Mail ran an article along the lines of "How did this happen? Who are the bastards making all this shit and why do we need it anyway?" encouraging shoppers to join the war on waste by dumping their surplus packaging in supermarket forecourts.
Good questions. After the second war the US economy of the 1940s needed to steer a vast economy of mass production towards peace-time products. Life magazine ran an issue titled 'Oh Joy, Oh Bliss, Throwaway living!' showing us how to liberate ourselves from domestic chores like DOING THE WASHING UP by buying prototypes of the disposable plastic shit we now take for granted. (3)
So how can I stand by when the Mail steps up to sort out the environment? On my next trip to Tesco I'll be packing my street-legal 6cm non-lockable blade, to gut my products from their insidious plastic before doing a runner into the car park clutching 22 individually unwrapped penguins. At least one of us will be seeing the funny side of global warming.
1 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7668178.stm
2 Jack Adams, http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n8/htdocs/bin.php
3 - Shout out to Captin Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation who answered this one. http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html
Life just isn't long enough to sort the mountains of household litter into PET, PPE, waxed foot cartons and whatever else you just bought in Tesco today.
Uncontent with the good old galvanised dustbin, the city council (pregnant with the news that the old scheme of dumping waste into a big pit off the A40 and calling it landfill was bollocks), passed the buck. Leaving us with a bizarre range of technicolor plastic crates which vary wildly according to your post code.
Yea, it looks pretty simple on the leaflets, plastic in the blue, paper in the green...I mean, you could train a monkey to do this with a bag of peanuts and a long weekend, or so you'd have thought.
Unfortunately this is the age of composites. And as I peel the plastic film window off the polystyrene wrapper of yet another free DVD thats landed on the doormat it occurs to me that something is horribly wrong. I read some New Scientist feature about how DVDs were stronger (and less bio-degradable) than the thermal tiles on a NASA shuttle. Odd then that they seem to go so wacko when they get even SLIGHTLY scratched, I think, dropping the whole lot into the wheelie-bin that still accounts for 60% of my household waste.
As if this wasn't bad enough, Nityanand Jayaraman followed the contents of a UK recycling crate which finished up in a landfill site somewhere outside Tamil Nadu, India (1) ,where I bet there are armies of barefoot kids just desperate to play skittles with your Brillo pads and used ToiletDucks.
Ok, ok but what the FUCK else do we do with it? I hear you ask. Well... get out there and use your initiative you council-tax paying bastards.
Kudos to the street kids of Barnsley who started a trend in wheelie-bin parties (2). Just half-inch a bin, spark it up with a splash of diesel and hold your head in it until you pass out! Wordup Barnsley! I respect anyone who can have that much fun with a dustbin. For the less hardcore I reckon there's still a lot of fun to be had out of the plastic crates. They're not bad as emergency garden furniture and they're just the right size for storing records.
Even the Daily Mail ran an article along the lines of "How did this happen? Who are the bastards making all this shit and why do we need it anyway?" encouraging shoppers to join the war on waste by dumping their surplus packaging in supermarket forecourts.
Good questions. After the second war the US economy of the 1940s needed to steer a vast economy of mass production towards peace-time products. Life magazine ran an issue titled 'Oh Joy, Oh Bliss, Throwaway living!' showing us how to liberate ourselves from domestic chores like DOING THE WASHING UP by buying prototypes of the disposable plastic shit we now take for granted. (3)
So how can I stand by when the Mail steps up to sort out the environment? On my next trip to Tesco I'll be packing my street-legal 6cm non-lockable blade, to gut my products from their insidious plastic before doing a runner into the car park clutching 22 individually unwrapped penguins. At least one of us will be seeing the funny side of global warming.
1 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7668178.stm
2 Jack Adams, http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n8/htdocs/bin.php
3 - Shout out to Captin Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation who answered this one. http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html