Waste Management or Disposal

This is fine, the BBC have released this film to highlight to us mere tax paying mortals the problem affecting the environment... Personally, I loath when I see any waste discarded, fly tipping being my personal bug bear in Nottinghamshire (a land-locked county).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-53287940/coronavirus-the-masks-you-throw-away-could-end-up-killing-a-whale

Good, great we all know...

But realistically what can we do about this?.... Well, we, or at least I certainly, pay my council for refuse collection services, they come each fortnight and take my waste away.  Any excess I store, compact and take to the local household waste site run by Biffa.

These are council services, they are firms whom have tended to the council to responsibly collect, manage and dispose of my waste on their behalf, and I as a customer of the council expect it to have been done responsibly.

Maybe, I should contact the council for an audit trail of where my waste goes, but I'm pretty sure the council would say "they collect it, and they dispose of it".. and way back when in the mists of the negotiations for that lowest rate possible waste collection service there was a plan probably waved about in front of a Councillor or clerk and it was accepted as the planned disposal method.

And across the whole country there will be similar, if not identical, sets ups with each and every council, from London to Llandudno, from Nottingham to Norfolk, everywhere in the UK the waste is collected and managed by councils.

So this piece of journalism by the BBC, though informative and ghastly, is really pointing the stick at the wrong folks, we can't opt out of council waste collection, one can't selectively only pay for part of the services afforded by our council tax.  If we could then one would be able to opt in and out of anything, chaos would reign.

The responsibility to dispose of this waste therefore, rather than it end up in the ecosystems of our planet, is that of the collecting agent, they took our money for it, we put our trust that its being fulfilled, and if not perhaps those councils need to be brought to account, rather than this kind of video make me feel guilt.

For I do feel guilt.

But there's very little practical steps I can take to dispose of my waste through any other channels, or companies.  I can't incinerate it myself, I can't bury it anywhere myself, I can't recycle things myself, they are large industrial tasks which is why I pay my fee and clearly hope for the best.

But the best isn't good enough.  Councils of the United Kingdom, sort this one out.

Nature : Greenland Shark (and Trawling)

I'm a big fan of nature, I like it a lot, what I'm not a huge fan of is fish, as I suffer massively from ichthyophobia.  I'm also, incidentally allergic to shellfish & fish oil, so there maybe some link, whatever... 

My phobia aside, I read recently about their finding out the Greenland shark was the oldest living vertebrate, with an individual being at least 250+ years old.  And their not reaching maturity until they're at least 150 years old, hence at the moment we have lots of teenage Greenland sharks and very few babies out there.

The reason we need the babies is that they were over fished, back years ago, they were used to make very good machine oil.  Again I guess something I'm a little happier about, as they're no longer used for this.

But in the study they had to use part of the sharks eye for the study, and they got these eyes from sharks caught by accident in giant trawling nets.

All the news outlets have focused on the scientific discovery of the age of these amazing animals, but no-one, not a single place I've looked has covered the tragedy that they had accidentally caught, killed and butchered this magnificently long lived female shark.

It's dead... It is no more... It was dragged out of the sea in which it had lived since the late 1700's and it was slaughtered on the rolling grimy deck of a trawler, or it may have already been dead in their great massive water hoovering net.

WHAT AN ABSOLUTE ABOMINATION!

No-one talks about this, I find fish repellent, but even without that in my mind, are fish from the ocean farmed?... No... So we go out and destroy whole ecosystems, whole magnificent creatures, they focused on dolphins getting stuck in Tuna nets, they focused Amazon forest clearance for beef cattle, but not on the fact we land dwelling, tree evolved monkeys, go out to a place so alien to us that we evolved away from it millions of years ago, and we trawl it clean of life.

We even make heroic TV programmes, "Trawler Men" and "Toughest Catch" and "River Monsters", though I admit the latter seem to put things back, and we vaunt how difficult it was to catch these fish; no-one stops to think we're destroying these huge swathes of ocean.

We have tiffs with other countries (The Cod Wars with Iceland, the EU Fishing Rights with Spain etc).


Then there's the utter hilarity of some countries and communities claiming it's some historic right, Japan or the Inuit (they know who I mean) catching Wales!


It's all so ridiculous, my grandfathers spent a lot of time in two different world wars shooting Germans, does that give me the right to claim I can go shoot them in some tradition?... No, because I'm a rational, normal, law abiding human being.

And we should show some human compassion towards other species, like the Greenland shark, before we hove into view with massive massive metal ships and drag them out of their living rooms to their death.

I hate it, I hate the thought of it.

If you like fish, farm your fish, like we do Loch Salmon.  Don't go destroying wild eco-systems.

This rant is at an end.



P.S. Yes I eat meat, but it's FARMED, smart arse, I don't eat wild plains buffalo, I eat animals kept in nicer conditions than some people, whom were bred, raised and put into the food chain for me, they did not destroy any wild infrastructure... (well a bit, but you know what I mean)