Environmental Protection Act, my arse


I went to the tip the other day. There I saw a notice board which filled me with horror and disgust. It said that under the Environmental Protection Act section blah blah blah it was an offence to take any rubbish out of the skips.

What the flying fuck are they thinking of? The most effective way to protect the environment from damage by rubbish is not to have the rubbish in the first place. They should be positively encouraging people to take rubbish out of the skips. It should be an offence to hinder people from so doing.

Many people are incredibly wasteful, and throw away large quantities of perfectly useful stuff. See those TV sets and washing machines in the tip? Chances are 50% of them work perfectly, and 50% of those that don't work are suffering from some trivial fault like a loose connection. Only about 5% of them are actually fucked. The rest have no business being in a tip. They should be salvaged and put back into circulation. It is trivial to see that this is far better for the environment than chucking them in a hole and building new ones and shipping them half way round the world.

Recycling is useful, but its usefulness is limited. Many items contain such a complex mixture of materials that they are a nightmare to recycle, and the energy and nasty chemicals involved show little advantage over manufacturing from scratch. It is far better to avoid trying to recycle such items, by repairing them and continuing to use them.

Sad to say, there do exist a significant number of wankers who have some irrational objection to people taking stuff off tips and deliberately frustrate this beneficial activity. I have seen not a few TV sets in which every single wire in the back has been cut; I solder them all back together, and the TV works fine. There was never anything wrong with it. It was just thrown away by someone who is not only stupid enough to throw away a perfectly good TV, but cuntish enough to try and stop anyone else using it.

I also remember a post from someone on an Internet forum who was boasting about how he had deliberately smashed the cones on a pair of perfectly good Mission speakers before throwing them away, then laughing at the reactions of would-be salvagers. I called him a cunt for it, but he was unrepentant.

Then there's the advert for the scrapyard which begins "Want to make sure your car is crushed? Don't want it sold on? Don't want parts from it sold on?" Needless to say, I'm not going to name the scrapyard in question in case it gets them business. I'd rather napalm the bastards. Don't want your car anymore? Fine. Get rid of it. But don't try and fuck up any chance of it being useful to someone else. The only valid reason for making sure a car is destroyed is to destroy any incriminating forensic evidence in it, and that is hardly a reason that should be supported.

Perhaps this so-called Environmental Protection Act was drafted by these kind of twats. Well, fuck them. The staff at the vast majority of tips are quite happy to look the other way given a little financial persusaion, so I shall continue to protect the environment by ignoring the stupid Environ Mental Protection Act.

And talking of scrapyards... even proper scrapyards are suffering under the EPA and similar ninnying shit. There's so much in the way of stupid regulations under the spurious excuse of protecting the environment that most of the traditional scrapyards have closed down. So instead of unbolting a usable component off an old car, you have to buy a new one, with all the associated environmental impact of manufacturing it and shipping it, plus that of getting rid of the old one.

Here's an exercise for all you twats who come up with this sort of fucking stupid legislation. Imagine a scrapyard full of old cars, piled up three or four high, with a band of happy hunters unbolting bits off them for further use. In time, pretty well everything that can be reused will be reused, at virtually zero environmental impact. The only input required is a bit of muscle power to twiddle spanners.

So, now we can imagine a great big mound of car parts - the mound you'd get if all the parts people have taken off were piled up all together.

Now we can imagine what's involved in making all those parts new. The digging of the ore of the metal out of a mine. The energy and chemicals required to do the digging, and to separate the ore from the base rock. The great big pile of waste that this separation leaves behind. More digging to obtain the other minerals required for smelting. The waste from the smelting. The energy used for smelting and refining and the huge cloud of emissions the processes give off. The further energy use in turning ingots into parts. The big lake of oil used to make plastic to wrap the parts up in. The trees cut down to make cardboard to wrap them in again. More lakes of oil to ship the parts round the world to their point of use. I could go on, but I can't be arsed.

Still think it's good for the environment, you fucking thick shits?

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