We need heavier bottoms
Martin Doyle
THE recent stir over our new rubbish bins brings back to mind a swirling memory.
When I was 18, I spent some months working on a rubbish truck in a town in Northern Queensland. Each of the men on the truck was armed with a big metal bin and you’d run onto people’s properties and empty their bins(s) directly into your one, then empty that one directly into the back of the truck. One particular day [Cue forboding music], I found a broken agitator out of an old washing machine standing on a packed bin. I duly emptied the packed bin into mine and tossed the agitator on top. An hour or so later, a distraught housewife rang the Council to ask if they’d seen her agitator. She’d been scrubbing her washing machine and had temporarily put the agitator on top of her bin in the yard... Luckily, after much grovelling in stinking mire, peace (or at least that piece) was restored to the town.
Then you get cities where there’s something wrong with the destination of rubbish. In Naples, they’ve had years of non-collection of rubbish due to malfunctioning incinerators and a constipated shortage of landfills. Garbage piles up like slag heaps in the streets, the place pongs, everyone’s angry and blaming everyone else. It’s got so bad that locals have actually set fire to mounds of rubbish on several occasions. ‘Bunga bunga’ Berlusconi, as an election promise a few years ago, said he’d get it sorted but the whole thing seems to have fallen through the cracks. In the past few weeks, the Italian army has arrived and begun shifting some of the stuff.
We in Wellington have generally kept a lid on any rubbish problems. The workers and the systems operate like a well-oiled machine. However, we made a blue several years ago when we introduced those little plastic “crates”. Each household had its own one and some people, like dogs marking a lamp-post, even painted their own house numbers all over their own personal crate. But the system was marred from Day One by the good ol’ Wellington wind. Once the dusties had emptied the crates into the truck, the flung-aside crates would just get blown here, there and everywhere in the gales. Since then, local households all view each other with suspicion [“Darling, you know who I think has got our crate...”]. Still, the key thing is to learn from our mistakes and never to forget the power of our wind: one day in 1968, we were whipped by cyclonic gales which got up to 275 km/h.
Our new tall green recycling bins, ominously equipped with big plastic wheels, have “Disaster” written all over them. They are so light in weight that, once emptied on collection day, they’re going to blow like rumbling, rolling, sliding juggernauts all over the streets. So, instead of smearing your address all over your bin, I’d recommend filling the bottom with... concrete.
When I was 18, I spent some months working on a rubbish truck in a town in Northern Queensland. Each of the men on the truck was armed with a big metal bin and you’d run onto people’s properties and empty their bins(s) directly into your one, then empty that one directly into the back of the truck. One particular day [Cue forboding music], I found a broken agitator out of an old washing machine standing on a packed bin. I duly emptied the packed bin into mine and tossed the agitator on top. An hour or so later, a distraught housewife rang the Council to ask if they’d seen her agitator. She’d been scrubbing her washing machine and had temporarily put the agitator on top of her bin in the yard... Luckily, after much grovelling in stinking mire, peace (or at least that piece) was restored to the town.
Then you get cities where there’s something wrong with the destination of rubbish. In Naples, they’ve had years of non-collection of rubbish due to malfunctioning incinerators and a constipated shortage of landfills. Garbage piles up like slag heaps in the streets, the place pongs, everyone’s angry and blaming everyone else. It’s got so bad that locals have actually set fire to mounds of rubbish on several occasions. ‘Bunga bunga’ Berlusconi, as an election promise a few years ago, said he’d get it sorted but the whole thing seems to have fallen through the cracks. In the past few weeks, the Italian army has arrived and begun shifting some of the stuff.
We in Wellington have generally kept a lid on any rubbish problems. The workers and the systems operate like a well-oiled machine. However, we made a blue several years ago when we introduced those little plastic “crates”. Each household had its own one and some people, like dogs marking a lamp-post, even painted their own house numbers all over their own personal crate. But the system was marred from Day One by the good ol’ Wellington wind. Once the dusties had emptied the crates into the truck, the flung-aside crates would just get blown here, there and everywhere in the gales. Since then, local households all view each other with suspicion [“Darling, you know who I think has got our crate...”]. Still, the key thing is to learn from our mistakes and never to forget the power of our wind: one day in 1968, we were whipped by cyclonic gales which got up to 275 km/h.
Our new tall green recycling bins, ominously equipped with big plastic wheels, have “Disaster” written all over them. They are so light in weight that, once emptied on collection day, they’re going to blow like rumbling, rolling, sliding juggernauts all over the streets. So, instead of smearing your address all over your bin, I’d recommend filling the bottom with... concrete.
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