Dublin City Council to massively increase bin charges

by Mike Fri Nov 19, 2004 22:34

That's a rather peculiar conclusion. I went to the indicated site and took a look at the charges.

Let's take your large family -- what do you call large, eight? OK, say eight people. And say each produces 2 1/2 litres of UNRECYLEABLE trash a day. That would only fill one of the small 140 litre bins or 221 for weekly collection. And to be honest, 2 1/2 litres per day means only minmal efforts at recycling. One of those 80 litre bags per week (at 2.50 or 130/year) would be enough for almost 1 1/2 litres per person per day.. Though I imagine old folks might have trouble carrying the bag (remember, it WOULDN'Y have heavy stuff like cans and bottles because THOSE go in recycling).

Reality is that anybody willing to put some effort into serious separation out of recycleables would have to pay very little for "bin collection" under the propsed scheme. Reality is also, at least around my neck of the woods, that the willingness of people to do so (we are "pay per throw") is almost totally unconnected to "class". Some people can't be bothered, come to the dump every week with a bunch of tagged bags. Others can't be bothered to separate the returnables (we have "bottle deposit") form the recycleables and each return container they dump into the meta & glass dumpster has a few dollars worth of returnables they are too lazy to separate.

I repeat, does NOT appear to be "class". There are rich folks for whom the cost of tagged bags or the bottle deposit means nothing but still they are "carteful". There are poor folks barely getting what to eat who can't be bothered to separate out their beer cans or even to sit on the bag to squeeze the air out (you can fit a lot of crap into those bags if you try). And vice versa, of course -- I was NOT meaning to imply that poor folks were careless and rich not, just that there is little to no correlation.

I'm sorry, but the reality is that the environmental crisis upon us is NOT simply an artifact of capitalism. A society which is a socialist paradise is still going to be faced with the disposal of trash and its members encouraged to do somethign about that AT THE POINT WHERE THE CRITICAL DECISONS ARE MADE.