The minister is upset about rubbish. But we need more than just a few throwaway remarks
Who imagined for a moment that the secretary of state for communities and local government, Eric Pickles, had a touch of the Gerard Manley Hopkins about him? “Bin blight.” Delightful, isn’t it? Roll it around your tongue a little and see how it feels. Write it down: you could even consider hyphenating for a touch of elegance, especially if you were after a compound adjective, as in “Britain’s bin-blighted streets”. A lovely word, then, to describe an utterly unlovely phenomenon: the massed plastic wheelie bins and recycling containers that have so offended Mr Pickles’ delicately calibrated sensibilities.
Would that he, like the poet before him, were presented with the more edifying spectacle of shivering aspens, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcons and so forth, rather than having to run the “ghastly gauntlet” – once you’ve started with the gorgeous imagery, it can be hard to stop – of streets and pathways cluttered with grotesque monuments to our daily detritus. It has quite upset him, you can tell; up and down the country, he fulminated: “Ugly bin clutter has ruined the street scene and the look of people’s homes and gardens.” Throughout the land, “barmy bin policies” have “made families’ lives hell”, although quite how is a touch unclear, as is the quality of rubbish that should make it so specifically distressing to families. Presumably, selfish singletons are more used to filth, to which they no doubt contribute by discarding their disposable cocktail shakers and used prophylactics over their shoulders as they conga to yet another orgy.
In the interests of fairness: if you are a “communities secretary”, it is reasonable that you should concern yourself with the health and happiness of the community, and it is captious of assorted knockers and carpers to moan when you do so. Moreover, Pickles’s central message is not so very controversial: does anyone actively love the sight of wheelie bins and long for their proliferation? Wouldn’t we rather our streets were unimpeded by rogue waste disposal vats that have been caught by a high wind and made a break for the highway, casters rotating furiously? Don’t even the most diligent recyclers occasionally put a carton where a bottle should go and get their grass cuttings mixed up with their cardboard?
But the problem with Mr Pickles is where these thoughts lead him – essentially, up that rubbish-strewn garden path. His key proposal seems to be that those in charge of building new housing should have a good think about where the bins might go, and ensure that it’s somewhere nicely out of sight.
Sensible enough, granted, but not really a head-on engagement with the more pressing issue of the provision of affordable new housing, nor much use for those who live somewhere that already exists. For the latter, we understand that their woeful situation might be alleviated by the minister’s suggestion that local authorities streamline their rococo recycling demands and provide some means by which we cover over our waste.
Therein lies the clue: sincere though Pickles’s distaste for the nation’s bins might be, his determination to direct and control the activities of councils seems closer to his heart. He has already declared that homeowners must be allowed to rent out their driveways as parking spaces – a rather larger-scale attempt to tidy up the streets, and one with a significant potential impact on council revenues (though a good way, as he pointed out, for families to “make some spare cash”; perhaps they could spend it on cheering themselves up after their lives had been made hell by a wheelie bin).
He has also threatened retribution for councils with inadequate rubbish collection services and, via the deregulation bill, called for a halt to fines for householders who don’t follow waste and recycling rules. There is, to veer briefly towards the week’s linguistic obsession, litter-ally no stopping him.
But wouldn’t we be better off if these skirmishes between central and local government were brought out into the open, rather than fumbled into a silly announcement about imaginary rubbish arrangements in putative housing developments? Or would we simply have to admit that – in urban areas particularly – the issue of the amount of waste we create, the processes to which we need to subject it to neutralise its harmful effects, the increased pressure on householders’ individual space and the lack of public resources available to deal with all of the above, is not something that can be dealt with by hiding our bins in a cupboard?
No matter how much Pickles might wish it otherwise, the contemporary “street scene” is no longer predominantly one of neatly clipped hedges and sparkling pathways, of Victorian lampposts and galvanised iron bins into which a single bag of rubbish is carefully deposited once a week.
We spew out the stuff now, at least those of us who can afford enough surplus with which to create it, from the food that we don’t really need to the unnecessary packaging in which it comes to the discarded purchases that didn’t suit and the sheaves of junk mail that still, in the paperless society, pour through the door. It has to go somewhere, and it won’t all fit into the kind of bin in which Top Cat made his compact but luxurious home.
It has to go somewhere, or we have to stop producing it in quite such staggering quantities. Pickles probably assumes that the latter is unlikely; he also thinks – with some justification – that local authorities need to address that problem rather than passing it on to the householder in the form of fines and uncollected rubbish while congratulating themselves on their brilliant commitment to the environment. But he is pulling the wool over his own eyes if he thinks that bespoke garbage zones in newbuilds is much of a response. You cannot, alas, gentrify your rubbish; or, in a rather more roughly hewn phrase that would surely provoke a shudder in the poetic Mr Pickles, you can’t polish a turd.
Comment is free | theguardian.com Mr Pickles, best if you bin that idea | Alex Clark
