From our friends in the UK comes a tale of environmental woe:
Robin Hood always feared the Sheriff of Nottingham, but always managed to get the better of him. Robin robbed the rich to give to the poor. The people of Nottingham, UK need Robin back soon because the local Sheriff’s department have found ways to rob the poor to give to the rich.
In 2010, the Council of Nottingham issued 227,680 warning letters to people who breached the waste refuse regulations. They followed this with 45,186 official statutory notices threatening fines and issued 1,200 penalty notices stating that the fine had been issued. People can be fined up to £1,000 for putting trash out on the wrong day, incorrectly sorting material for recycling and, unbelievably, placing the trash in the wrong place, which can be less than one foot from its desired location! Environmental responsibility is one thing, but this is ridiculous.
Homeowners under Attack
It’s not businesses who are suffering from the onslaught. Instead caring homeowners are being attacked for their lack of recycling efforts. When going green came into fashion and recycling became the buzzword, most Britons took to the task with pride and dedication, and not a little healthy competition among neighbours. As well as recycling waste paper, glass, bottles and old clothing, some even used composters. When the eco-nanny state resulted in paying for plastic bags at the food store and high gas prices they went along with that too. But they never expected that they would one day receive a personal visit from the waste police to check on how they had disposed of teabags.
Teabag Laws
It’s sad, but true. A 74 year old man from Blackburn, UK, received a polite warning that his trash wouldn’t be removed at all because he had put a teabag in with other trash when it should have been placed in his food recycling container. High treason, indeed!
Ironically, in Britain, over-regulation of recycling and environmental protection laws is having the opposite effect to the one intended. Brits are starting to recycle less because of the pressure from the bin police to ensure everything is recycled correctly. Instead of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, it’s ‘panic, fines and what goes where?’
The British are not bothered by the need for different containers to separate all the waste; the trouble is the fines for making minor mistakes. They’re fed up with being bullied by people who seem to have nothing better to do, but who is really to blame?
The authorities argue that European rules on landfill reduction are to blame for the harsher regulations. Shifting waste collection from weekly to every two weeks, say the councils, will reduce the amount going to waste centres, as long as the public sticks to the 3Rs.
The only problem is that the rules are different for every area. In one zone people will need to separate food waste while in the next zone citizens won’t need to. Some zones have six waste containers while others have one. If this goes on, in the future, home owners won’t just have to consider schools and other amenities when moving home, but the bin police rules too!
The Wrong Trash Day
Here’s how silly it gets. A famous singer put her trash out a day early because she was about to go away on tour. She received a £100 fine for placing her ‘wheelie bin’ in the right location at the wrong time. She was trying to help by making sure the waste was collected and not sitting at home raising maggot families while she was away.
The British want to recycle and help slowdown global warming as much as anyone, but they are hot under the collar about the fines. The British government has suggested that the fines will be stopped for all but the most terrible offences, such as illegal dumping. That’s now on the rise because people are giving up on trying to prepare their waste correctly – it’s just too hard. Compared with keeping up with the regulations or trying to take waste to a government facility, dumping waste on the side of a busy highway is starting to look good. Food for thought.
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The world has gone insane and it was the Green Clubbers who took us there.
Environmentalism was supposed to be about living cleaner, healthier lives. It was not designed to bankrupt the majority of the population who already pay city taxes for weekly garbage removal.
Here, in her excellent piece, Izzy has very effectively shown us that the United States and Canada do not have a monopoly on the fallout from an environmental movement gone berserk.
And it isn’t going to stop until the whole world stands on its haunches and says, “No more!”
The perpetrators of the “Save the Planet” hoax were rich and feeling guilty because they grew up spoiled and wasteful. And they wanted everybody else to feel guilty, too.
Anybody who grew up before the 1960s knew instinctively how to reuse and recycle; it was a necessity of life for people of modest means who could not afford to waste.
Now people have come to recognize societal stupidity. Therefore, the government has been forced to convert people on the wheel to comply with ridiculous command-and-control laws, otherwise face unaffordable fines for not obeying.
When I was growing up, people possessed what was called common sense. The “environmental” concept was the same as now, only we didn’t know about plastic wheelie bins. We had built-to-last galvanized garbage cans, complete with lids and handles.
Home and business owners paid city taxes in return for weekly garbage collection. In the evening before garbage-pickup day, two or three metal garbage cans sprouted up along the sidewalks in front of everybody’s house. We were so very clever back then, knowing how to sort the garbage from the trash from the grass clippings.
Our garbage truck driver was clever, too. He not only knew how to drive that big beast but he could discern a garbage can when he saw one. Wherever he saw one, he stopped, giving his two-man crew time to go to either side of the street, bring the cans back to the truck, empty them, and return the cans to their rightful place. Then the truck slowly inched down the street to the next batch of gleaming cans.
Clever, don’t you think? And not an imposition on the crew if a garbage can was one inch off the mark from where it had been parked the week before.
In the terrible heat of summer, residents rushed out along the route with pitchers of iced tea or lemonade and homemade cookies and tiny sandwiches for the garbage guys. The men, who could not tarry long, sat in the shade of an oak a few minutes, gratefully gulping their refreshments that had not been tested for contents by the Food and Drug Nazis. The men didn’t get sick or die; they were back the next week.
To me, this is reminiscent of wartime when the 28th Canadian Armoured Regiment, a.k.a. the British Columbia Regiment, was threading a tracked convoy in 1944 from Sussex to London, England. All along the route, the wayside was lined with generous people who had very little themselves. Yet, whenever the convoy of their saviours halted for a few moments, the ladies appeared with tea, buns, cigarettes, soft drinks–even beer.
As they moved into the city, going by London Bridge, the Tower of London and White Chapel, they were greeted with plenty of waving and shouting. A combination of dust, hot sun and exhaust fumes caused an epidemic of very painful eyes. By noon, many men had difficulty seeing. Northeast of London, near South Woodford, the sympathetic locals came forth to extend cotton swabs dipped in a mild antiseptic of boracic (boric acid) that was very appreciated for soothing sore eyes.
These people were all fighting the Nazis. There certainly weren’t any Nazi Food and Drug Inspectors on the scene shutting down the generous British ladies from handing out refreshments and antiseptics to the grateful Canadian soldiers. A Nazi brigade of any ilk would have been shot on the spot. And it’s an idea that may have merit for recycling.
So, the garbage men left the empty garbage containers behind that were a blight on the neat, coiffed landscape and lawns. Residents brought them in as soon as possible. Nobody in the household walked past them, not even the kids, who, coming in from school or play, didn’t need to be told to move the cans to the back or into the garage. They just did it if the adults hadn’t had time to take care of the task. Or they might go over to assist elderly neighbours to restore their garbage cans to their rightful storage place.
Nobody thought or talked about garbage collection, except when the price increased; it was a weekly routine and everybody just naturally knew the unspoken rules because people of the day all had common sense and a sense of community and neighbours.
Government can’t do anything right, so it is no wonder that the implementation of the expensive, useless reuse-recycle-reduce program has been turned into a cash cow and a job creator for law enforcers at command-and-control central through passage of ridiculous laws that nobody can obey. That is the whole purpose. The government is going to make criminals out of us all. And nobody can escape fines which the low-income population can ill-afford to pay.
Environmentalism is a rich-man’s hobby. Everybody else should be exempt from participating.
The city hall fascists in the UK passing make-work project bylaws for hiring Garbage Nazis is right up the alley with some articles on this blogsite about city hall fascists passing ill-conceived bylaws that have the police chasing big crime that happens to be shutting down underage kids’ lemonade stands across the U.S. and city hall fascists threatening a Michigan woman with jail time for growing criminal vegetables in her front lawn.
Whatever Izzy shines a light on next from the UK–gun control, hikes in gasoline prices, out-of-control taxes, fallout from changing to a new currency, collapse of the economy, stupid environmental laws, Muslim invasion, etcetra and so forth–will be harbingers for what we can expect to blow West across the Big Pond right into Canada’s face, as has proven to be the case in the past.