Rubbish

When I was temping a dozen or so years ago I was happy to take any job offered. Some weeks I could only work for a couple of days due to my music commitments, so I was happy to take the odd one or two day assignments.
One May Bank Holiday I was asked to do a day working on the Domestic Refuse Collection at the basic minimum wage, but at double time for a Bank Holiday otherwise I'd have turned it down. It was hard and heavy manual work for someone in his late forties, but I gave it a go.
I turned up bright and early at the Council Depot, climbed into the Refuse lorry and we drove to a neighbouring town where we were to do our round. There were three of us, the driver and two mates who worked on opposite sides of the street. You've all seen how they do it. It's quite hard and there's a knack in getting the bin onto the hoist and then getting the empties away. The lorry is constantly moving and you have to watch out for traffic. You very rarely sit in the lorry and you're always on the go. I wouldn't want to do the job for minimum wage.
We drove up and down the streets which were quiet as it was a Bank Holiday. As we drove down one street in a rough part of town a man came out of a house, saw me and started effing and blinding "Who you looking at? I'll smash your face in", etc etc. Charming man, charming neighbourhood.
After an hour or two the lorry was full so we climbed in and drove off to the tip. This journey comprised my morning break. We returned to carry on the round and filled the lorry twice more before we finished the round in the early afternoon.
I politely turned down other offers of odd days on the bins at single time. The job is worth more than that.

A few months later I was offered a couple of days work at the landfill site that we'd dumped the household refuse. It had been very windy and paper and other rubbish had escaped the netting surrounding the tip and had to be picked up. So I spent a couple of days litter picking from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. I turned up at the gatehouse and they gave me a roll of black bags and told to get on with it. The netting that surrounds the tip is very good at catching any paper or plastic that blows around, but if too much sticks to the netting the net becomes a wall and the rubbish is lifted over the netting, so the first priority was to clear the netting. Pick the rubbish off the net, put it into a black bag. When the bag is full, drop it into the tip. Repeat until all the rubbish is collected. Once that was done I cleared all the rubbish inside the boundary of the tip, then all the fields around the tip for a quarter of a mile or so.

Plastic takes forever to degrade. There's a wood a short distance from my house that is the site of an ironstone quarry. The overburden (the soil and rock that covers the iron ore) was removed with a mechanical shovel and tipped so that it formed ridges and valleys known as hill and dale. These were planted with trees and the gullet was eventually filled with household refuse. It's possible to walk through the woods and see the site of the gullet, and also see old washing up liquid bottles sticking out of the ground and showing no signs of decomposing

I spent a couple of days clearing old plastic bags from the fields and hedges, enjoying the open air and being inspired to write a song or two. The only downside was the fact that my trusty Doc Martens finally gave out and began to leak water after a year of hard use, in factories and three months walking the streets pushing charity bags through letterboxes (but that's another story)

The driver of the Refuse lorry told me that when this landfill tip was opened it had enough capacity for over thirty year's worth of domestic rubbish. It had been in use for just over fifteen years and was almost full, such was the increase in the local population and the amount of rubbish they were throwing away.

Since then the council has introduced a two weekly refuse collection and recycling for domestic customers. We're quite happy to sort out our rubbish, with different bins for garden and household waste, and boxes for glass, paper, metal and plastic containers. What I'm less happy about is this.

I'm responsible for making sure my firm's rubbish is collected. It's a small firm with only a few staff, but even so we can produce a lot of cardboard and waste paper, drinks cans etc. I called the Council to ask if they had any facility to separate the recycleable stuff from the rest of the rubbish. They said that hadn't and had no plans to extend recycling to business customers.
Our business rubbish is collected in blue plastic bags that currently cost about £1.60 each. If I separate out the recyclable items I'm left with one or two blue bags that we have to leave out overnight as the binmen go by before the office opens. At the moment we don't have an urban fox problem and the rats are well fed from the rubbish left outside the many takeaways at the end of the street.

I can see the benefit of recycling. I've worked as a binman and I've worked in the landfill site. I'm happy to separate my household rubbish so that the council can sell the cardboard, cans and paper to offset the cost of landfill.
What I don't understand is why the council can't or won't extend the recycling scheme to their business customers.
I suspect that it's more to do with taking money from businesses than recycling.