It’s going to be a rubbish column this week. This isn’t to say that the quality of the writing won’t be every bit as effervescent (or not) as usual, just that the subject is, well, rubbish.
Why am I writing about rubbish? The fact is there is a lot of it about these days. We are creating more rubbish than ever before which means that local authorities are struggling to do everything within their power to dispose of the mountains of waste as efficiently as possible.
Or at least, many councils are trying to cope with it as efficiently as possible. My own authority has taken the decision to deal with refuse disposal in the most inefficient, messy and unhygienic way it can think of.
Thus, whereas many authorities supply households with large wheelie-bins so that household refuse can be stored cleanly and disposed off efficiently, Enfield in North London has decided that the best way to clear rubbish from the streets is to instruct householders to pile their rubbish in black bin bags outside their houses so that the bin men can throw half the bags into the rubbish lorry and spill the other half on to the streets.
Still, at least the refuse collectors come every week. Other councils have decided, rather counter-intuitively, that the best way to deal with double the refuse is to halve the collections. In an era when there was little rubbish, it was collected every week. Now that there is a lot more, it is collected every two weeks. Go figure.
Of course, the authorities say resources are stretched. We are also told that Britain is the fourth largest economy in the world with a GDP that still outstrips that of China. We are rich enough to hold an Olympic games and fight a war simultaneously in Iraq and Afghanistan but cannot afford to have rubbish collected every week.
I’m not saying that we should not try to do all we possibly can to keep rubbish to a minimum — of course we should. For example, these days I try to eat as much food packaging as I can rather than throw it away, and I also use supermarket plastic bags as lamp shades, although because they keep melting I find I get through several every week.
I have also started to compost. I have arranged all of my inedible food packaging into a large bin in the garden. I estimate that if I manage to keep it at the right temperature and encourage worms to inhabit the container, it should all have bio-degraded within 764 years — a long-term project but a worthwhile one.
Anyway, there is a silver lining to what is a rather smelly black cloud. In the past, wildlife had a tough problem thriving in urban areas, but now we have a feast of wildlife for the urban Bill Oddie to observe — we could call it Rubbish Watch. On Wednesday evenings when the bin bags go out, if one climbs into a shelter with a good pair of binoculars it is possible to spot maggots, flies, cockroaches, mice, rats and foxes. In fact, if it wasn’t for this amateur waste-disposal team, much of the waste would still be lying in the street weeks later.
Anyway, we should all be doing our bit for the environment, so if I can remind readers that when you have finished this column (unless you are particularly interested in what Geoffrey Alderman has to say this week) I would be obliged if you could place me in your recycle bin and close the lid tightly.
Who knows, I might come back as The Guardian.