This is what happens when you give the job to amateurs

Lovely Louise Gray over at the Telegraph is doing her bit for recycling again.

We keep sending more and more of our recycling to landfill, apparently. According to her pals over at DEFRA, it's gone up by 50,000 tons in two years: everybody involved somehow contrives to keep the total recycling figure a secret from we readers - to hide an inconvenient fact such as a drop in the percentage being sent to landfill perhaps?

Of course, it's all our fault.

"Environmental groups have blamed councils for failing to educate households about which materials to put in the recycling bin.."

= We're thick.

"Recycling has to be dumped if it is "contaminated" with the wrong material, for example smashed glass put in alongside newspapers.."

= We're thick

"Mal Williams, of the Campaign for Real Recycling, blamed the system where councils collect different streams, like paper, plastic and cardboard in one bag".

= We need to separate rubbish more and we need more bins.

"Up to 10 per cent of the material has to be dumped because it is mixed with the wrong materials, such as bottle tops and food waste".

= We're thick.

"Julian Kirby, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said that councils must make sure the material collected for recycling is processed correctly rather than dumped or burned".

= We're thick and so are our councils.

"It's not just how much recycling we do that's important, it's also how we do it," he said. Gary Porter, the chairman of the Local Government Association Environment Board.."

= I'm paid a great deal of money to state the bleedin' obvious.

"The vast majority of people do the right thing, which is great. But the slight increase in contamination rates demonstrates why it is important for councils to be able to identify and work with people who misunderstand or make mistakes when sorting their rubbish."

= We're thick - but some of us are thicker than others and will need to be sent to special re-education camps.

The real answer is to stop producing crap for which there is no purpose other than to be thrown away. Time Traveller Boy II went to the shop today to buy a product from the world's richest 'concerned environmentalist'. The product was a number which could have been printed on his sales receipt.

Instead, as you'll see from the picture above, it came printed on a card, laid into a dvd-sized tray of indeterminate material, in a cardboard sleeve...

At least TTBoyII had the good sense to decline a bag to put it in.


Time Traveller blogs at Adventures in Time Travel