Damien on… Recycling

If we all recycle, the World will immediately become the New Eden – right? No, no, NO!!!

It’s CRAP. Look, what do all these government Nazis ask? That you separate your rubbish into bins labelled “cardboard/paper”, “clear glass”, “coloured glass”, “tins”, etc. And whoa betide you if you don’t.

But THEY know it’s crap. The only reason they do it, is to appear GREEN.

Okay, let’s take glass. Its main ingredient is SAND. And sand is PLENTIFUL – ask any Arab.

What about paper? Well, to re-use it, you have to BLEACH it – a very un-green process.

Tins. They’re made of steel – and sometimes some aluminium. Steel is made from iron and carbon, while aluminium is made from aluminium. Which three elements are among the most common on our planet. 

And as for plastic… We’ve all seen those little symbols – three arrows in a triangle with a number in the middle. To recycle plastic requires some poor schmuck to HAND-SORT it according to that number.

The thing is, it’s all unnecessary. REAL recycling has been going on for decades.

70% of “cardboard” boxes have been recycled ever since the technique of marrying corrugated paper to flat paper was invented. In the fifties. Same time as “containers”.

Valuable metals are worth MONEY and thus have been recycled for CENTURIES. Check your local scrap-yard.

And nowadays, most wood and paper is made from trees grown in SUSTAINABLE forests – where, every two years, they cut down one tree in seven and drag it through the remaining trees. It costs more than just mowing down a forest, but it means that said forest will last FOREVER.

As for plastic, this is a generic term for a whole BUNCH of substances that are mostly – like glass, iron, carbon and aluminium – NOT in short supply.

Okay, where does all this stuff GO, if it’s not recycled? Into the ocean? Into huge piles in our countryside? NO!!!

Governments have LEARNED from past mistakes and now operate well-maintained LAND-FILL sites. Dig a big hole – put in the rubbish – cover and landscape. And we won’t run out of these sites for MILLENNIA.

But until governments ADMIT that most of the stuff you laboriously sort into separate bins (sometimes, having WASHED it first) ends UP lumped together in land-fills, because no-one WANTS it, we are DOOMED to take PART in this nonsense.

This writer’s personal peeve is “sachets”. These days you are effectively FINED for buying soap in a plastic bottle. In a bottle, it’ll cost you 20% extra – despite the additional manufacturing cost being virtually NOTHING.

A sachet (a THIN plastic container) costs 0.04p as opposed to a standard one which costs 0.05p. Which means you have to keep decanting your soap, while the bottle gets progressively DIRTIER.

And – unless you want to WASTE 20% of the SOAP, which CLINGS to the inside of the sachet – you have to mess about watering it down so’s you can get it OUT. And then the sachet falls over, because it’s not good at standing up, spilling the contents over the damn FLOOR. It’s BULLSHIT!

And look how many people buy into it. Stop anyone on the street and they’ll go ON about how important recycling is. But when you ask them for FACTS, you’ll discover they know NOTHING about it. They’ve just been BRAINWASHED by all the hype.

Of course we should not LITTER. We should put our crap into the bin. But just ONE bin. And watch it go sailing off to that nice, safe, ecologically-sound land-fill site. Then go about our business…