Throwaway Line
CONSUMING INTEREST
By LESLIE ADRIAN
THE opposite of the packaging cult, with which the PR tribe has plagued us for many a year, is the ill litter that weighs 28 lb. a week for each household, according to Design maga- zine's February issue. If this be true, my family is in grave danger of being charged excess garbage by the borough council, for I would guess that our corporation-issue plastic bin with top-heavy metal lid weighs at least twice that twice a week—assuming that they empty it so often. There are times when I suspect that they get properly fed up and just don't go to work. There are others when they're even more fed up and leave half the contents sprawled nakedly in view of the neighbours—gin bottles, instant- coffee cans, cinders, old nylons, and even more embarrassing signs of life.
The standard conical plastic bin ('Do not fill with hot cinders. Do not overfill') is for auto- matic emptying in a special truck which cannot get into our mews. Which is why the boys get bored toting them around like the old kind and lighten their load en route. But if we do use the old kind, and we have one, dents and all, they will not look at it. It is not 'official,' and the contents would cost us 3s. tlfd. per cwt., supposing that the borough agreed to send a rubbish inspector to see it. As far as I could see, the weight is guesswork. Our six cwt. of `extra refuse' was removed by six men in a special truck and weighed in secret.
Rubbish is like motor-cars. Every year more pours forth and creates problems, and every year, while we are solving the problem of the year before last, last year's difficulties are de- veloping into next year's, only more so. As with roads, little or no science, and positively no prescience, goes into rubbish disposal in this country. These automatic tippers, which depend so much on standardisation, are a recent inno- vation, late in the day, where other countries like West Germany got going more than ten years ago, and achieved in some cities a workable level of uniformity.
They used metal bins, because tough plastics were not then a practical alternative. Are they now, I wonder, when hot cinders can melt the bin, cold clinker can scratch it and make a home for heroic germs to live in, and there is no scorching them out again as in the old days? Admittedly, they make less noise when they fall over in the night and in a gale. But they distort with bashing about, the lids do not cover the contents and in the summer they smell like the Kasbah.
Design seems to feel that we can never revert
to wartime saving of such things as waste paper and metal goods by segregating them ourselves, because people just could not be bothered, although the ready-made salvage would pay some of the cost of an improved service. It's all very well to talk of rubbish chutes, American style, roaring the junk into a central incinerator for central heating, but I have yet to hear of a block of British flats so equipped. The best so far is chutes to a central dump for onward transmission to the totters or the tips. But in order to have this system there has to be a small receiver of garbage, like a pedal bin, to accumu- late a worthwhile amount to chuck. You can hardly stalk to your covered chute entry with every eggshell.
And these bins are all soft plastic, worse than
the corporation specials. Paper liners are a good idea (Garbina sacks are 5s. 6d. for thirty), but not cheap, and plastic-film liners are awkward. As Design says, garbage grinders are too limited, refusing to chew anything tougher than bacon rind unless it happens to be a piece of the ancestral silver that got in with the tea-leaves, and most of them would balk at a piece of string from the roast bird or a scrap of dish- cloth. But somebody should look at the whole rubbishy business. Just because London sold its Dagenham rubbish tip to Henry Ford, we don't have to go on mucking about for ever.
Dry rot, it seems, is prevalent in the wetter half of Britain, and particularly in the north- west. Conversely, wet rot occurs on the dry eastern side of the country, and most heavily in London, East Anglia and Essex, and far less in Lancashire and North Wales.
These discoveries and other localisations of, for example, woodworm, death-watch beetle and furniture beetle were established by Rentokil in a survey of nearly 150,000 buildings and recorded by Dr Norman Hickin in a new book, The Conservation of Building Timbers (Hutchin- son, 35s.). His maps show that anobium puncta- turn, the furniture borer, is busiest in the counties bordering the South Coast; death-watch beetle in Wessex; and the wood-boring weevil in London and Essex, collaborating with the wet-rot fungus. He has added a chapter on insurance against woodworm and dry rot.
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Never mind the tiger in your tank; have a leopard in your bathroom, compliments of the wallpaper manufacturers. They also offer a python for the parlour, and 'What could be more fabulous for a teenager's room than a furry goatskin on the wall?'
But wallpaper fantasy doesn't stop there. The designs include fake shelves for those who `do not want to bother to collect ornaments' (or I perhaps books that might have to be dusted); 1 fake tiles; and fake Tudor beams; 'or perhaps you have a fancy for elm planking, rope netting, I wrought iron or a grey split beech fence.' Oddly enough, we actually have a wall made of real bricks: perhaps we had better paper it over with mock stone 'so rough and stony-looking you feel sure you would bruise your hand if you ran it along their surface,' or the new 'brick' paper designed from hand-made bricks brought over from Holland.
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