I've been reading more of John V Taylor's prophetic book from 1975, "Enough is Enough". We are moving towards recycling more, but it is still amazing - and alarming - how little move has been made in the way towards reycycling. St John's Parish does a lot, some like St Brelade's recycle glass, but as Philip Rondel (now Deputy) pointed out, there should be an all-Island Parish recycling system so that it becomes viable. Perhaps all Parish could make a timetable for change, rather than just letting it drift, saying they are committed to bring in a targets on recycling by particular dates. Of course there may be an impact on rates for refuse collection, but as John Taylor points out (in the extract below), it is about time we took responsibility for our waste, and that includes the financial cost.
Another of Phil's good ideas was to have people in a Parish take responsibility for small sections of road, perhaps near where they live, and would go out and tidy these up, both as an act of good citizenship, and also in the long term, a saving in road cleaning expenses. It would be good to have a map at the Parish Hall, in public display, and highlight the roads "adopted" by parishioners (perhaps in green marker pen!), and list names below so that individuals could feel that their part counted and was recognised as important.
The litter that is dropped is still atrocious, and a lot of it is plastic bottles, sweet wrappers or tin cans - items that do not degrade instantly or quickly, and are symptomatic of the "throw-away" society that John Taylor is talking about. Read this extract - and remember it was written in 1975!
The waste-mongers
Another of Phil's good ideas was to have people in a Parish take responsibility for small sections of road, perhaps near where they live, and would go out and tidy these up, both as an act of good citizenship, and also in the long term, a saving in road cleaning expenses. It would be good to have a map at the Parish Hall, in public display, and highlight the roads "adopted" by parishioners (perhaps in green marker pen!), and list names below so that individuals could feel that their part counted and was recognised as important.
The litter that is dropped is still atrocious, and a lot of it is plastic bottles, sweet wrappers or tin cans - items that do not degrade instantly or quickly, and are symptomatic of the "throw-away" society that John Taylor is talking about. Read this extract - and remember it was written in 1975!
The waste-mongers
An extract from "Enough is Enough" by John V Taylor (1975)
With 50 million cars darting like minnows across the darkening surface of the United States, the pressure is on to persuade all the owners to turn in their present models. So year by year 7 million are junked - 70,000 of them abandoned in the streets of New York alone. The old adage, 'Waste not, want not', is endorsed by the champions of growth as a principle in an entirely negative sense. Those who won't waste don't want: since we want them to want, we must make them waste. So along with 7 million discarded cars in the States go 48 billion metal cans, 26 billion bottles and 65 billion metal bottle caps. The steel in the vehicles is recycled in a desultory way, but no one seems interested in bottles. For the same reason, the junk rooms and the cellars and the bottom shelves of larders in most of the homes of Britain are overflowing with glass jars and bottles which no firm will take back, with the honourable exception of the milk retailers. And even they are threatening plastic now. No one wants plastic back. It is so cheap to make and costs so much to use again, or to destroy. Its indestructibility, in fact, is its greatest horror. A holiday month in the Shetlands in 1973 was full of the atmosphere of doomed resignation as the day of the oil-rigs drew near. But already the white sands and pastel-shaded rocks of those remote shores were fouled with a deposit of plastic sheeting and containers of all shapes and sizes. This was not the litter of tourists nor of the vanguard of the oil companies' Irish labourers; it had come in on the tides from the shipping of the North Sea. It was simply homo affluens marking his triumphal path along the sea lanes and highways of the world with a more enduring substance than all the stones of Ozymandias.
Any concentrated population is bound to present a problem of waste disposal. Industry has to deal somehow with its own effluents. But the spoilt child of the Western nursery scatters his cast-off and his broken plastic toys about the room, assuming that his two nursemaids, air and water, will go on clearing up the mess as they always have. He needs to learn, and learn quickly that air and water do not belong to him alone, and that their services are not free. Both industry and the private citizen must be taught the common courtesy of clearing up after themselves, by bearing full financial responsibility for the thorough disposal of recycling of their wastes, instead of passing them on to their unfortunate neighbours. For today the tides of trade and tourism are ubiquitous, and Western enterprise is piling the same mountains of garbage on the markets of the Third World. What falls from the rich man's table is not crumbs but poisons and plastics.
Technology can deal with this problem of disposal if producer and consumers are compelled to pay for the solution by, for example, accepting a tax on cans and bottles that cannot be easily recycled, and installing, as a few cities have done, plant that burn garbage to generate electricity and returns the city's waste to the land in the form of compost. But the spoilt child wants too mud for too little. The individual consumer doesn't want to include in the price of his purchases the real cost of disposing of the left-overs; and firms refuse to bear the cost of recycling or treating their waste product, unless they are given tax relief. Private profit matters more than public environment.
The effect of deliberately fostering this throw-away mentality is incalculable. It very quickly seeps back into the places where it has been generated - the industries and business houses themselves.
The con-men fall for their own conning. Waste becomes endemic even in the processes that are supposed to be making the wealth. A flagrant example of this is the energy industry. Just as the railways indulged in the gigantic throw-away of an efficient canal-system, and were themselves, in turn, thrown away by the British road-transport interests, the same one-track mindedness sets the electrical power industry against the coal-gas industry and both against the fuel-oil industry. This absurd charade of competition makes it possible for the electricity generating industry, while striving to get one half per cent extra efficiency out of the turbines and heat exchangers, blandly to dump the energy of 75% of the fuel it has consumed. But the Central Electricity Generating Board has only one purpose - to produce electricity. It is not interested in what happens to all the steam it produces, which, as has been proved in Germany and Sweden, is a far more economical form of home-heating, releasing electricity for the higher thermal needs for which it is more appropriate. But no; the master-minds of Growth are by now themselves infected with the throw-away mentality they have done so much to spread abroad. At the end of the day, to cultivate the habit of wastefulness will always prove wasteful.
With 50 million cars darting like minnows across the darkening surface of the United States, the pressure is on to persuade all the owners to turn in their present models. So year by year 7 million are junked - 70,000 of them abandoned in the streets of New York alone. The old adage, 'Waste not, want not', is endorsed by the champions of growth as a principle in an entirely negative sense. Those who won't waste don't want: since we want them to want, we must make them waste. So along with 7 million discarded cars in the States go 48 billion metal cans, 26 billion bottles and 65 billion metal bottle caps. The steel in the vehicles is recycled in a desultory way, but no one seems interested in bottles. For the same reason, the junk rooms and the cellars and the bottom shelves of larders in most of the homes of Britain are overflowing with glass jars and bottles which no firm will take back, with the honourable exception of the milk retailers. And even they are threatening plastic now. No one wants plastic back. It is so cheap to make and costs so much to use again, or to destroy. Its indestructibility, in fact, is its greatest horror. A holiday month in the Shetlands in 1973 was full of the atmosphere of doomed resignation as the day of the oil-rigs drew near. But already the white sands and pastel-shaded rocks of those remote shores were fouled with a deposit of plastic sheeting and containers of all shapes and sizes. This was not the litter of tourists nor of the vanguard of the oil companies' Irish labourers; it had come in on the tides from the shipping of the North Sea. It was simply homo affluens marking his triumphal path along the sea lanes and highways of the world with a more enduring substance than all the stones of Ozymandias.
Any concentrated population is bound to present a problem of waste disposal. Industry has to deal somehow with its own effluents. But the spoilt child of the Western nursery scatters his cast-off and his broken plastic toys about the room, assuming that his two nursemaids, air and water, will go on clearing up the mess as they always have. He needs to learn, and learn quickly that air and water do not belong to him alone, and that their services are not free. Both industry and the private citizen must be taught the common courtesy of clearing up after themselves, by bearing full financial responsibility for the thorough disposal of recycling of their wastes, instead of passing them on to their unfortunate neighbours. For today the tides of trade and tourism are ubiquitous, and Western enterprise is piling the same mountains of garbage on the markets of the Third World. What falls from the rich man's table is not crumbs but poisons and plastics.
Technology can deal with this problem of disposal if producer and consumers are compelled to pay for the solution by, for example, accepting a tax on cans and bottles that cannot be easily recycled, and installing, as a few cities have done, plant that burn garbage to generate electricity and returns the city's waste to the land in the form of compost. But the spoilt child wants too mud for too little. The individual consumer doesn't want to include in the price of his purchases the real cost of disposing of the left-overs; and firms refuse to bear the cost of recycling or treating their waste product, unless they are given tax relief. Private profit matters more than public environment.
The effect of deliberately fostering this throw-away mentality is incalculable. It very quickly seeps back into the places where it has been generated - the industries and business houses themselves.
The con-men fall for their own conning. Waste becomes endemic even in the processes that are supposed to be making the wealth. A flagrant example of this is the energy industry. Just as the railways indulged in the gigantic throw-away of an efficient canal-system, and were themselves, in turn, thrown away by the British road-transport interests, the same one-track mindedness sets the electrical power industry against the coal-gas industry and both against the fuel-oil industry. This absurd charade of competition makes it possible for the electricity generating industry, while striving to get one half per cent extra efficiency out of the turbines and heat exchangers, blandly to dump the energy of 75% of the fuel it has consumed. But the Central Electricity Generating Board has only one purpose - to produce electricity. It is not interested in what happens to all the steam it produces, which, as has been proved in Germany and Sweden, is a far more economical form of home-heating, releasing electricity for the higher thermal needs for which it is more appropriate. But no; the master-minds of Growth are by now themselves infected with the throw-away mentality they have done so much to spread abroad. At the end of the day, to cultivate the habit of wastefulness will always prove wasteful.
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