Hold on, people, waste management is a subject that affects the whole planet!

In Don DeLillo's masterly novel Underworld there's a section where he deals with waste. Trash, garbage, detritus. It's a more interesting subject that people might imagine. He takes the view that the transition from pre-history to history took place when people started discarding things which gave future generations a clue to how they lived. It also represented the point at which we started to see ourselves as being outside nature and saw the earth as being something that was there for us to exploit, a belief we subsequently reified through the invention of religion.

Heaven only knows what whatever the amoeba evolve into after we are all gone will make of us. We make stuff from minerals that we find under the ground, package them in other minerals that we find under the ground, then when we are finished with it we dig another big hole in the ground and throw it all into it. They'll wonder how any civilisation who dealt with the Earth in that way could have lasted so long; excpet of course that post-industrial cilivisation has only lasted around 200 years and it may not last that long again. Then again, Human consciousness has only existed for 30,000 years at most, so it's possible that if any other life form develops they'll see us the way we see the way we see the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

That's something to think about next time you throw a used condom into the bin. Unfortunately I'm thinking about waste an awful lot lately, becuase I live in the northside of Cork and people are refusing to pay bin charges and the waste is really starting to pile up and stink the place up.

It's getting to be a bit like London in the 70's, or that Simpsons episode where Homer gets on the wrong side of City Hall and they refuse to pick up his waste.
A few things struck me about that episode, for instance the Simpsons kept using disposable nappies when clearly it would have made more sense to use old-fashioned cloth nappies in the circumstances. It's neatly symbolic of how we've become locked in to an endless cycle of generating waste.

In Britain in the 70's the binmen went on strike for ages. It could have provided an oppurtunity to start looking at waste in a different way, to stop even calling it waste and to start looking at it more as a resource, as they still do in many Eastern countries. In Tibet, cadavers are fed to birds of prey, and in most of India vegetable waste is eaten by cows who convert it into fertiliser. Needless to mention, this way of thinking was alien to the high anglican cleaniness-is-next-to-godliness Margeret Thatcher, who thought smashing the unions was the answer, and though the bins did get picked up it did nothing to solve the long term problems of waste management.

Clearly people in the Northside of Cork have learned nothing from this, choosing to respond to the ham-fisted way the City Corporation has imposed bin charges by leaving all their trash out on the street and hope that city hall will eventually give in, though there's no sign of them backing down as of yet. When the summer comes and tourist agencies for flies start telling them that Cork is the new Calcutta, it might be a different story for the people running the soi-dissant City of Culture, though they might persuade visitors that the piles of trash are some sort of outsider art project, which in a very loose sense I suppose they are.

Though I have little support for either side in this stand-off, I joined the protest in Cork last weekend. I kind of joined in the chanting, though I could never summon the same sort of wrath I could for the Iraq war and occupation. At one stage I started my own comically prolix chant, which went something like "What do we want? An integrated and environmentally sustainable waste management policy! When do we want it? Now!" The organisers weren't amused. Neither were the cops, of whom there were enough to clean up the streets (in a literal sense) if they weren't expressly prohibited by law from doing so. The really Orwellian thing is that while anyone advertising a demo by handing out fliers can get nicked for littering, the government have washed their hands of any responsibilty for keeping the streets clean.

I'm actually in favour of the polluter pays principle, the problem is that while they're charging €5 per bin, the initial charge is €255, so a household only has to pay twice as much if they fill a bin every week than if they only fill it once a year. As well as this, while the government endlessly shows ads telling us to recycle stuff, they rely on the private sector to take care of it, as they seem to have got it into their heads that these people are selfless altruists for whom making money is a serendipitous epiphenomon. And it's ordinary consumers that are being picked on, not big business or construction.

I've been making an effort to recycle my stuff for years, but it ain't easy. Ireland is one of the worst countries in Europe for recylcing and Cork is one of the worst cities in the country for people who don't want to throw stuff out.
I wish the government would stop waiting for those nice capitalists who love the Earth so much to take care of the problem and do something themelves. I wish they's discourage all the superfluous packaging that makes consumers lives more difficult in every way and get newspaper publishers to stop having so many supplements, especially motoring supplements, which no-one reads (as far as I know)

Not that recycling isn't profitable, though. Rumour has it that while we see all that plastic that our consumer goods get stuffed into as waste, those resorceful Chinese see it as a resource. If recycling companies can do a deal with them, the whole process will go like this:

1. Company makes product, puts it into packaging, which is referred to as "adding value", though really there're just adding cost.

2.Company sells prodcut to consumer, charging extra for the packaging.

3. Consumer a) throws stuff into bin, contributing to waste Charges, or
b) gives it to recylcing company who take it for free, which looks like they're doing you a favour, then

4. They sell it to Chinese guys at a massive profit, they reconstitute it, sell it to companies and the cycle goes back to 1.

Everyone's a winner, except the consumer who gets fucked over at every stage, and the people whose countries get invaded to provide the oil to make the plastics and the people who's trees get cut down to provide the paper, and living organisms that need oxygen to breath.

This bigger picture is one many bin charge protestors seem to miss. When Joe Higgins of the Socialist party was in Cork he showed himself to extremely well informed about environmantal aspects of waste management, but I got the impression from local counciller Mick Barry that he wanted people to recycle stuff just to get out of paying bin charges.

It's this sort of tunnel vision that's leading to rubbish pile up on the streets, though, like in that Simpsons episode, the solution is pretty simple. If the Corporation just gave a complete waiver to anyone on disabilty, charged a resonable price, and made sure everyone had access to recycling bins, all but the most hard-core refusniks would comply.

Yet it seems to me that we're a city of Homers with no level-headed Marge among us.