7 December (Part 1) - Waste not want not
The reason I am happy to go along with Bexley Council’s recycling schemes is
that it is not very difficult to stick to their rules and they
stopped fining people
for leaving a black sack by the side of a bin or when vermin, human
or otherwise, makes off with a bag and dumps it in the next street.
If we went back to that sort of tyrannical regime I think I might don my rebel’s hat and do what rebels do. Not
much chance of that under Cabinet Member Richard Diment I would have thought; oh wait a
minute, isn’t he the man behind the proliferation of yellow money box scams?
Yesterday I said that I didn’t spend much time looking at political websites but by following links
I ended up on this one
which included the interesting statistics that may be seen below right.
Fairly trivial amounts of paper and tin cans get put into the green bin but a
shocking third of the rubbish that goes into it is food waste. The 10% of
textile waste I can understand, who would phone for the collection of the tattered
square of muslin I found a couple of weeks ago at the bottom of the pile of tea
towels in a kitchen drawer? It went in the bin but nothing similar has happened before that I can remember.
Old towels go in the shed and garage as rags until they disintegrate.
It’s the same with food. Who buys so much at inflated prices for shrink-flated
products that 30% goes in the bin? Do we have a population comprised mainly of juvenile fussy
eaters? What happened to domestic science lessons at school? Has any single
thing in this country improved over the past 40 years?
Once again I can adopt a holier than thou position, I know exactly how much food
has gone out of my house uneaten this year. I found two ‘baby’ new potatoes at the
back of a fridge drawer that had escaped from their pack and had gone black and
squishy. I cut them into smaller pieces and put them in the garden compost bin
which Bexley’s Labour administration kindly subsidised for me 20 years ago. Still going strong.
My food waste bin is in pristine condition and used for storing toilet rolls. I suppose there is some
sort of tenuous link between its intended use and mine.
A Council which can’t spell waste on their website featuring waste! Oh well; it is Bexley afterall.