Julia Gasper 30 July 2009
Last week we all got a leaflet from the local council, telling us sternly that in future they will not collect any extra rubbish put out alongside the infamous wheelie-bins. If you can’t fit what you’re throwing away into a wheelie-bin, you must drive it to the dump yourself. I suspect that the result of this will be that many people will resort to fly-tipping (randomly dumping or scattering their rubbish as litter) while others, with greater cunning, will creep down the road and put it into somebody else’s bin.
The new regulation, like all of the present system, derives from laws designed to reduce what we send to landfill. Personally I agree that using a lot of land for disposing of rubbish is undesirable, and that we throw away far too much. What we throw away is far more than previous generations did. It is bulky, it is expensive to dispose of and it is an ugly sight. So I acknowledge that there is a problem, but I think that the present laws (which actually come from the EU) are not addressing it in the best way. They are only addressing the symptoms, not the disease. http://www.oxfordprospect.co.uk/Juliagaspercolumn.htm
Julia Gasper.
