Occasionally it can be instructive to listen to the rabble on the other side of the political fence. Please note that Dr. Dogshit has tongue firmly embedded in cheek here……
Seriously (just for a moment, OK?) scanning the headlines and editorials of left wing dailies and periodicals on a semi regular basis is useful and a prescribed remedy when one gets an attack of rightitis. Before visiting your local doctor, take a tour through some publications with an avowed political view at odds with your own. Rinse & repeat. You will begin to experience a sense of relief almost immediately.
SO it was this morning. Your intrepid reporter wandered over to the New Statesman to see what the unwashed are carrying on about. To my considerable surprise I discovered a leader which not only made sense, but is almost non-partisan. Incomplete yes, flawed in places yes, but lacking the shrill rhetoric so characteristic of the left.
Within living memory, Britain was a country where recycling was a way of life and waste was abhorred. Milk was delivered in glass bottles and the empties were left on the doorstep for collection the next morning.
The silver tops were kept to buy guide dogs for the blind. A beer or soft-drink bottle carried a deposit that was recoverable on its return. Rag-and-bone men toured the streets seeking waste material.
Children who failed to eat up their food were sternly told the Chinese/Africans would be grateful for it. Shops would charge for bags (which became a subject of growing consumer indignation) and so you took your own bag instead. Socks were darned, elbows patched and small pieces of string kept in the cupboard under the stairs.
Boy do I remember those days with astonishing clarity. The same clarity with which I recall freezing cold houses, pisspots under the bed, ice on the INSIDE of my bedroom windows and windowframes in the mornings, & rising damp. In other words, an overwhelming feeling that I was living in the third world (I now know that, in fact, I was). I also clearly recall shooting stones from a hand held catapult at the rag and bone man’s horse. My God did that cause me a shitstorm of grief and agony. As is often the case, I digress….back to the narrative at hand.
Most of these things were commonplace, at least until the 1960s. But no sooner had we created our new, more convenient world than we started worrying about it. Friends of the Earth launched its first waste campaign – returning thousands of empty bottles to Schweppes – in 1971, and the first bottle banks appeared in 1977. A 25 per cent target for recycling of household waste was set in 1990; even though we’ve reached the target, the amount we consume has risen so steeply that unrecycled waste has fallen only slightly.
In plain language the Western world is walking backwards into a swamp. The article goes on to say……
The whole issue of waste is surely one of the great policy failures of the past 50 years. With global warming, politicians can at least argue that the science was inconclusive until about 20 years ago. But it was always obvious that our capacity to dispose of waste wasn’t infinite.
Even now, governments do little more than nag consumers, with local authorities mandated to threaten fines or unemptied dustbins (the prospect of the latter always terrifies the British) for those who put their cans in the wrong receptacle. However, as the House of Lords science committee observes in a report published on 20 August (HL Paper 163), that isn’t really the problem: only 9 per cent of total waste is domestic. And, as usual, the government is reluctant to confront powerful business interests. Regulations exist – usually thanks to Brussels – but they are opaque, fitfully enforced and disjointed. For example, a European directive makes each individual electrical manufacturer responsible for taking back, reusing and disposing of its own products. No EU member has implemented the directive and, in the UK, it isn’t even on the statute book.
Don’t…..PLEASE DON’T get Dr. Dogshit started on the issue of “the statute book”. Let’s move on, shall we?
I don’t deny that regulation is difficult. Quite often laws, introduced for entirely laudable purposes, exacerbate other problems. The Lords committee explains how regulations to make vehicles safer also create more materials to be disposed of and, by increasing weight, further add to carbon emissions. Hygiene regulations, combined with retailers’ mortal fear of being accused of poisoning their customers, are responsible for a high proportion of food waste. Nor would I pretend consumers can always be let off the hook.
Wait….wait…..just hang on, this next bit is priceless;
As a Unilever representative rather irritably pointed out to the Lords committee, people who complain about excessive packaging for shampoos would do more for the environment if they turned off the shower while they lathered their hair.
HAHAHAHA! It would be hard for an adherent of any political philosophy to argue the merits of that assertion! Ooooh, I can feel an upcoming post evolving which might perhaps be tantalizingly entitled; “Fat, Lazy, Ignorant White People don’t give a damn about the consequences (or the costs) of their actions”
Obviously the greater majority of people have never lived or worked on a submarine. Every last drop of water is of vital importance, and the habits that living in that environment create are useful. Wet body, turn off water…soap up & clean body (and hair), turn water on, rinse soap away, turn water off -> exit. You would be amazed at how little water is necessary to take a really pleasant shower. Let’s not discuss any other habits acquired while cruising the depths in defense of life, liberty, and Soviet submarines intent on starting WW III. Onwards………
Nevertheless, waste is integral to what Robert Reich, in his most recent book, [Editor's note: URL inserted, it does not appear in the original article] calls “supercapitalism”. Unchecked supercapitalism produces waste as inevitably as it produces inequality, job insecurity, loss of community and so on. We are rapidly reaching the point, long promised by futurologists, where we throw away clothes after wearing them once, and we already dispose of many electrical goods as soon as they go wrong.
The average British household currently spends a mere 60p a week on repairs. The economic logic is impeccable: the goods are made in countries where labour costs are low, while repairs have to be carried out here, where costs are high. But even when goods don’t need repairing, we still throw them away. Supercapitalism’s brilliant answer to increasing durability is to elaborate and refine so that goods feel obsolete almost as soon as you buy them. Even environmentalism has been turned to supercapitalism’s advantage: always buy a new machine, you are told, because it will be more energy-efficient than the old one.
That was a clever point, and rather well made – by Dr. Reich in his book, not by Mr. Wilby, the article author.
Business talks of “consumer demand”. But nobody ever marched to demand an end to recyclable milk bottles, more upgrades for mobile phones, more cheap Chinese imports. (People usually march to protect something they have, perhaps a job or a nice view, not to gain something they don’t have.)
Eh? What utter rubbish! “We demand higher wages”, “We demand shorter hours”, “We demand an end to totalitarian rule” this list is endless. FFS, completely absurd….
Greengrocers got by for years telling their customers there was “no demand, madam” for anything more exotic than a cabbage.
OK, that’s one aspect of “the old way” we’re heartfelt glad to see gone!
People buy what is made available to them, provided it delivers gratification at a reasonable price. As Reich points out, supercapitalism gives us great deals as consumers and investors, without our even troubling to ask for them. Unfortunately, it gives us bad deals as citizens. Drowning us in waste is just one of them.
A mostly sensible article, and there’s little in there to disagree with – except…when I do disagree with it. Sorry folks, I just can’t help it.
I do question however whether this was an article on recycling, or a book review. If it was the former then part of the essential structure for any discussion about recycling (meaning the economic underpinnings and forward looking cost/benefit ratios of various types of recycling) is missing. If it was the latter then it’s an appallingly written, unimaginably awful review. Considering that it was written by Peter Wilby, I’m disappointed. He’s been around journalism for long enough to know better. Then again, it’s the New Statesman, not the Spectator I stuck my head over the fence to see what was laying around, I didn’t say I was ready to sign up for a subscription.
Tennis anyone?
