Topic: The sinister secrets of the dustbin Nazis.

[karen leakey]

From Littlejohns collumn in yesterdays Mail.

Has Littlejohn been reading Tobes posts from here?     

'tougher rules and fortnightly collections will be unpopular and will lead to an increase in littering, fly-tipping and dumping of waste in other people's bins and recycling containers'.

I particularly like this line as we were told, after suggesting that all of these problems would happen, that they were 'hypothetical' and 'to invent problems and hypothesise about what can or cannot be done before they occur is a futile exercise'. But what do we know? 

So, If SBC introduce a pay as you throw rubbish collection service, which they say at the moment they will not do, will we be told the same?
It's just another manifestation of our Punishment Culture, about showing us who's boss. - Seems to have a ring of truth about it.
 


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-567353/LITTLEJOHN-The-sinister-secrets-dustbin-Nazis.html


LITTLEJOHN: The sinister secrets of the dustbin Nazis
By RICHARD LITTLEJOHN

After Labour's mauling in the local elections, Gordon Brown announced that the hated plans for pay-as-you-throw rubbish taxes would be scrapped. That was a blatant lie and he knew it.

Within days it became clear that 'trials' would still be going ahead. Why bother piloting something which you have no intention of introducing?

Far from dropping the scheme, Labour is ploughing on despite the trivial matter of what the electorate thinks.

That's because ministers are obediently implementing orders from our real government in Brussels. Gordon couldn't stop pay-as-you-throw taxes even if he wanted to, which he doesn't.

He was the one who cranked up landfill taxes in his last "green" budget to meet EU recycling targets, which is why councils are cutting back on collections in the first place.

All is revealed in European directive 75/442/EEC on waste disposal. In answer to a parliamentary question from the Tories, ministers have been forced to admit that they are following rules laid down in an EU handbook entitled "Variable Rate Pricing based on Pay As You Throw as a Tool of Urban Waste Management".

This "toolkit" lays down the blueprint for charging every household for the amount of rubbish it generates.

It has been produced by the Dresden University of Technology, which was commissioned by the EU under the "Fifth European Commission Framework Programme".

The Eurocrats admit bin charges are a "politically sensitive issue", and warn of "uncertain and perhaps uncontrollable citizens' response". But the handbook stresses "this lack of consensus should not be allowed to intimidate us into avoiding innovation".

Rubbish! Gordon Brown said plans for pay-as-you-throw taxes would be scrapped. But now pilots are going ahead

They acknowledge that higher charges, tougher rules and fortnightly collections will be unpopular and will lead to an increase in littering, fly-tipping and dumping of waste in other people's bins and recycling containers.

To combat this, it urges the "disciplining of citizens" by "intensive observation of illegal waste disposal through patrol and special task forces".

Councils should set up a "police department" to sift through rubbish to search for the addresses of "offenders" in discarded mail, and issue fines of up to £400.

All those stories about people being punished for leaving the lid of their bin open, putting out the "wrong" kind of rubbish or dropping an old gas bill in a public litter bin can be traced back to this sinister document.

They weren't isolated incidents, or the result of over-zealous enforcement by bloody-minded local officials - they were part of the great masterplan.

Thought those reports of some councils installing microchips in wheelie bins was localised madness? Think again. It's all outlined in this handbook.

The eventual aim is for every dustbin to have an "individual identification code" using either "transponder chips or barcodes".

Dustcarts will be fitted with tracking devices, which explains that story a couple of weeks ago about York City Council spending £40,000 fitting sat-nav systems to all its refuse lorries, complete with maps of the whole of Europe.

At the time we assumed it was just the latest wheeze for wasting taxpayers' money. Now we know that it was simply York getting ahead of the curve.

It also explains why all those people who ejected their local councillors in last year's Town Hall elections in the na've belief that they would get their weekly rubbish collections reinstated have discovered that their votes didn't make the slightest bit of difference.

Local democracy - or democracy of any kind, come to that - has no place in Brave New Europe.

The recycling rules were designed to accommodate the Low Countries, which have run out of landfill sites. But nowhere are they being more rigidly applied than in Britain.

On the back of this directive, our government has introduced a draconian rubbish collection regime, designed to bully, fine and tax hard-pressed householders.

All those of us who sort our bottles and newspapers into separate boxes under the illusion that we are doing our bit to save the polar bears are wasting our time.

A few months ago, I wrote about watching dustmen in the London Borough of Camden throwing all the carefully recycled rubbish into the same bin as household waste and then chucking it onto their cart in one huge pile.

Now it has been revealed that the amount of domestic rubbish recycled by Camden in Britain is precisely nothing. Every last magazine, wine bottle and plastic container is dumped into containers and shipped to the Far East for recycling. And Camden is just the tip of the waste mountain.

In the name of protecting the planet, we are transporting our rubbish thousands of miles away to the other side of the world. It doesn't get much more environmentally friendly than that.

Of course, that won't stop Camden, or any other council, rigorously enforcing "Variable Rate Pricing based on Pay As You Throw as a Tool of Urban Waste Management", as laid out in European directive 75/442/EEC.

Taxing and fining people and refusing to empty the dustbins every week isn't about "climate change" or "global warming".

It's just another manifestation of our Punishment Culture, about showing us who's boss.

This is how Britain is now governed, through rules drawn up by German academics, at the behest of unelected bureaucrats in Belgium, and enforced by single-issue lunatics hired out of the jobs pages of The Guardian.

It's been going on for years, but in signing the European Constitution without a referendum, Gordon Brown consigned to the landfill site the last vestiges of our ability to govern ourself.

We no longer even have any say over how often our dustbins are emptied.

The sooner Labour is thrown in the wheelie bin, the better. Now, I would pay good money for that.

[ZPW]

Hey KLIQ.

Hmm... I have longer suspected that Tobes was a psuedonym ... perhaps he is in fact Littlejohn?

To the point of your post.

Whilst we have a Tory/Labour seesaw bin thing going on.. that is Tory cncl following Labour policy of fortnighltly bin collection.. we do have a few people of principle in EssBeeSee *... A long while ago on this forum we had the bin-tag scare when the Grand Bin Man wanted to RFID the Swindon wheelies, in readiness one presumes for the pay-as-yer-throw initiative.
IIRC there was a bit of  a jostle and not-in-my-name amongst the non-Amdega** cncllrs. that libertarian road minister rabble rousing I suspect.....
The result being no chips in Swindon bins.
This being A GOOD THING.

Am I missing something? Has the recent gentle election lulled me... or indeed is this as it seems?
A few***decent cncllrs standing up for the whole community?


Go on... take a shot...

[Tobes]

Hmm... I have longer suspected that Tobes was a psuedonym ... perhaps he is in fact Littlejohn?

Damn! I am betrayed!!!

Actually, although I love the invective, even Littlejohn outdoes me... and besides, I'm far nicer in real life ;-) ! (Any news editors / researchers reading TS, I am available for freelance writing)

[PAV]

'tougher rules and fortnightly collections will be unpopular and will lead to an increase in littering, fly-tipping and dumping of waste in other people's bins and recycling containers'.

But has there been an increase in littering, fly-tiping and dumping of waste in other people's bins and recycling containers since fortnightly collections have been introduced?

I've seen an increase in people leaving rubbish outside for over seven days, but that's because they persist in putting their bins out weekly, rather than fortnightly. This also seems to only happen in areas where black bags are collected, rather than wheelie bins, which suggests laziness and stupidity rather than anything else?

Couple this with the fact that there has been a marked increase in petty vandalism and grafitti it would suggest to me that fortnightly collections are less to blame than people's "don't give a f**k attitude" to how and where they live.

[Tobes]

Fly-tipping, which already costs local councils over £100m a year, is only set to get worse if action is not taken, according to the Countryside Alliance (CA).

- http://www.countrylife.co.uk/news/country/article/113303/Fly_tipping_costs_to_increase.html

Recycling sites throughout the island are being abused by fly tipping.  The problem has increased over the last few weeks, with rubbish including a load of old laminate flooring, household rubbish and rotting garden waste dumped around the recycling banks.

Half of all fly-tips recorded involved single black bags and it is estimated that the majority of these occurred in back alleys and involved waste placed out for collection incorrectly, primarily in Liverpool. However, when Liverpool City Council is excluded, 48 per cent of all recorded fly-tips occurred on the highway and 53 per cent of fly-tips were of a car boot or small van load in size.

- http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/2007/071009b.htm

Figures collected from councils which have switched from weekly to fortnightly bin emptying reveal dramatic increases in complaints over the dumping of rubbish. These suggest that efforts to boost recycling by cutting waste collections could have an unintended and highly damaging side-effect.

- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-451250/Fly-tipping-menace-cutting-bin-rounds.html

More than 2.6 million reported fly-tipping incidents have cost local authorities over £76 million to clean up in 2006 – 2007, an increase of 5% on the previous year, with 93% of fly-tipping taking place in predominantly urban areas. Across London and the South east it has cost local authorities more than £25 million in the past year.

- http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/news/1922908

Oh, and take a look around... There's loads more litter blowing around my street these days - despite a weekly visit from a street cleaner - something which has only started after the new scheme was introduced...

[PAV]

There is a lot of litter Tobes, but as I said, is this a symptom of fortnightly collections?

My favourite piece of street furniture/Swindon paraphernalia is the Coca Cola fridge, dumped in the undergrowth behind the corner shop on the junction of Kingshill Road and William Street, but clearly visible form the main road.

Every day Kingshill Road gets closer to challenging County Road for the title of "Shittest Street in Swindon".

[Tobes]

My favourite piece of street furniture/Swindon paraphernalia is the Coca Cola fridge, dumped in the undergrowth behind the corner shop on the junction of Kingshill Road and William Street, but clearly visible form the main road.

I know it well, a beautiful landmark, an endorsement of the owner of that gardens aesthetic and societal values... 

... but it was there long before AWC...

People have been dumping white goods for years now... whats changed is the increased volume of bag-dumped litter (either wheelie overflow - or stuff spilled from orange boxes)

[Tobes]

... and lo! The CCTVs are going up and the Inspectors have started to patrol - all at tax payers expense of course. Predictable, shambolic and insane.

http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/4502611.Streets_plagued_by_dumped_rubbish/?ref=mc

WARDENS are searching through bin bags and installing CCTV to crack down on people turning multi-cultural Broadgreen into a rubbish tip.

Swindon Council is also on the hunt for crooks in the area who charge residents and businesses to dispose of their rubbish but dump it instead.

The problem of wayward refuse has grown to such an extent, that people feel it has replaced prostitution as the area’s biggest issue.

AWC has created a situation where rubbish has replaced prostitution as the areas biggest problem!  (and SBC thought we were being cynical and pessimistic about the effect which the new policy was going to have - well, heres the proof of the quality of their judgement versus that of the contributors to TS! )

[peach]

This morning I watched council workmen remove two orange recycling boxes full of what appeared to be plumber's waste, from the lane running between Corporation and Alfred St.  They also chose to ignore a growing pile of black sacks, broken furniture and electrical items piled against one of the garage doors backing into the lane, on the basis that it was on private land. 

My mind boggles at why they would ignore it, when clearly it has been dumped.  Or least ask the owner of the garage to remove it.  Or do something other than pretend it is not there.  Rubbish seems to attract more rubbish and when the pile eventually falls over they're sure to come back and remove it then..

[Tobes]

All symptomatic of these times of short termist false economies and financial expediency.

There is a good chance that the 'recycling officers' (aka dustmen) are on a contract to a third party - not direct employees of SBC. No doubt they are metricated and measured and have stupid targets written up by their employers and are not empowered to do anything except meet those targets and stick ridgedly to their work remit. In short, that means they couldn't give the proverbial monkeys about anything 'off target'. Its all part of the same system of jobs-worthiness which kicks out the various insane scenarios listed throughout the pages of Talk Swindon. Here are a couple of personal experiences I've had in relation to rubbish:

1. Our rubbish collection is on a Friday at about 6.00am. This means that most people put their bags out as late as they can Thursday evening to try and make the foxes and cats life as difficult as possible. Unfortunately, it means that our drunken youth returning home from a club or the boozer can (and frequently do) kick/throw these bags up and down the street, or, if the cheeky little tykes are feeling mischievious, they can rip them open and dump the contents on the cars. I phoned the Rubbish Dept at the council to ask whether it would be acceptable to place the bin bags just behind my gate to help avoid putting temptation in an apes way. I was informed by the idiot on the other end of the phone that this would not be possible. Not for anything approaching reason, like the extra time it might take a performance driven operative to operate a gate latch, but because if an employee strayed onto my property, they might be 'sued for trespass'!!!!

2. Some numpties on our street still put out black bin bags or dump random pieces of refuse on the pavement. These stay rotting on the street after being bypassed by the weekly collection of rubbish, the weekly collection of 'recycling' and the weekly visit by the litter picking bloke. You would have thought that all these guys, working for the same department, MIGHT call this stuff in as having been fly-tipped or make arrangement to get it cleared up - but according to the council dept, this stuff will stay there until its called in and reported as dumped by a resident  

[Mart]

Might have mentioned this before, but never mind.

The poor lady found dead in a wheelie bin in, I believe, Chertsey, had been languishing in it for 3 weeks.

The binmen had written the bin up as too heavy and apparently failed to notice her foot sticking out of the top (allegedly, might be embellishment).

Empty the bins.

[kecl]

AWC has created a situation where rubbish has replaced prostitution as the areas biggest problem!  (and SBC thought we were being cynical and pessimistic about the effect which the new policy was going to have - well, heres the proof of the quality of their judgement versus that of the contributors to TS! )

If we'd added 'if you introduce AWC and wheelies then rubbish will take over as a bigger problem than prostitution in Broadgreen' to our carefully thought out objections to AWC and wheelies , we would have been laughed out of court at the time!

[Tobes]

Still, at least the recycling operatives who collect their rubbish are getting it right, eh?   


http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/4509428.Three_arrested_over_Brazil_waste_allegations/

Three men were arrested today in connection with the alleged export of 99 shipping containers of illegal waste from the UK to Brazil, the Environment Agency said.

Officers from the Environment Agency's National Environmental Crime Team raided three properties in the Swindon area early this morning, as part of investigations into the origin of 1,400 tonnes of waste reportedly found in Brazilian ports.

Wiltshire Police arrested a 49-year-old, a 28-year-old and a 24-year old man in connection with the Environment Agency's investigation.

[Simon]

but because if an employee strayed onto my property, they might be 'sued for trespass'!!!!

Hmmm, yet I have a leaflet from the council entitled "Waste and Recycling Collection Dates until June 2009" (product code ART1238/FOI 2979/09) which says

Your box should be placed at the point on your own property nearest to the public highway

(my emphasis)

and

Your wheelie bin has to be placed out for collection.... alongside your recycling box

I also remember a letter delivered to residents of my road some years back (this was in the pre-wheelie era) specifically stating that black backs should not be left on the public footpath, but should be left on our own property at the point nearest the highway.

I'm confused. Are the rules different in Eastcott and Grange Park?

[komadori]

No, rules are the same throughout Swindon and are as Simon describes. The only thing that is variable is the inaccuracy of the answers given by Swindon Commercial Services when you phone them with a problem.