Man faces £50,000 fly-tipping fine for turning derelict park into community allotment
Simon Martin insists he has done nothing wrong by moving soil ‘no more than 10 metres from the same area’
Whatever the laws are there will always be edge cases which can be made to seem absurd. They’re actually saying clean up your mess and we’ll say no more about it. Sensible.
A Vale of Glamorgan Council spokesman said: “Our Waste Crime Unit officers
Waste crime unit? Now that’s a problem……another little bureaucratic empire to feed….
We’ve got a problem with fly tipping round here, but it’s partly (mostly?) caused by increasing regulation and decreasing service. You can put less and less types of stuff in your bin, the council’s stopped doing free pickups of big stuff, you’re restricted as to what can be taken to the tip (or when), and there’s landfill tax. It’s no wonder people take short cuts or hire someone to deal with the problem with no questions asked.
As usual we don’t get the full story, so I will mot wade in too far. But, the council in the article seem to be saying, clear it up and then we:ll decide if there was a crime.
Fly tipping is often a product of councils’ own policies. They earn twice on disposing of rubbish : council tax and tip charges, or with endless bureaucratic conundra for the disposers to solve. I recently cleared my gutters, after the snow in December, they were filled with silt. I have a bucket of mud to dispose of, but no garden. It will cost me £4 to take it to the tip – or I could empty it into the sea instead.
Otto, wouldn’t the correct place be: “right in the entrance of City Hall”?
Simple thing with fly tipping would be to stop this distinction of business and personal waste. All business is ultimately done to serve the public. Charging businesses just gets added to the costs to consumers. If it means the books don’t balance, add a little to other taxes to compensate. You can then fire a whole load of bureaucrats.
We never used to have so many fly tippers back in the days when bins were realistically sized, you didn’t have to play irl garbage Tetris with a ludicrous number of tiny coloured plastic boxes, and they took them away every week.
Now I’m paying the council several thousand pounds a year and I’m lucky if they can be arsed taking the equivalent of three bin bags away fortnightly.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a jumped up arsehole refusing to take your bin away because the lid is ajar by a couple of inches
Well of course its a lot easier to persecute blokes like this than a bunch of violent criminals who engage in fly tipping as a very lucrative business. Typical bureaucratic behaviour – have a nominal aim of doing X, only ever bother doing anything thats easy for you to do, rather than the hard cases that the society thats paying you would prefer were attacked first.
I get fly tipped stuff in the gateways to my fields on a regular basis. Fortunately as such I can get the council to collect it, as its outside the hedge line, so counts as public highway. If it were on my land I’d be responsible for disposing of it. There are cases where criminals have broken into land and tipped hundreds of tonnes of waste and the landowner has been liable to dispose of it legally at his expense.
IMO what needs to be done is that all items when sold to a consumer should include a tax that is to pay for that item’s correct disposal once its no longer needed. Then when you dispose of it correctly, you get some of that money back. Thus meaning waste no longer is a cost, its a benefit. It would actually pay people to collect litter and rubbish, or not fly tip it in the first place, because by taking it to the correct location they could get £££.
IMO what needs to be done is that all items when sold to a consumer should include a tax that is to pay for that item’s correct disposal once its no longer needed. Then when you dispose of it correctly, you get some of that money back.
Don’t worry, we won’t take the piss out of you with this lovely new eco-tax.
Get rid of the whole fucking lot of it (my solution to most things)
Find a space where you can dig a big hole. People and businesses have a choice – pay the council for their “service” to collect and take the crap to this big hole, pay a private company to do it, or take it yourself.
Operators at Big Hole Ltd will sift out anything of recyclable value (what they can sell at a profit) and dump the rest in said big hole. If the oh-look-at-me-I’m-saving-the-planet wankers want to sift through the rest of the shit then let them on their own time and coin.
Problem solved. Tim often says theirs no shortage of land for big holes, and so there should be plenty of space left over to put the waste crime fuckers in too
What we need are holistic local solutions that don’t destroy the environment and leave us at the mercy of the rapacious capitalism of Big Hole.
What we need are holistic local solutions that don’t destroy the environment and leave us at the mercy of the rapacious capitalism of Big Hole.
Don’t you ever speak of Sally like that.
“While the intention may have been to create allotments, in reality stone-borders have been placed along the rubberised surface of the playground and soil and turf deposited on top.”
To be fair, pouring soil over a rubberised playground does not make an allotment.
“ Simon Martin stepped in to transform the park, which shut 15 years ago, after it became a jungle of weeds”
Ah, this is the problem; he’s actually done something where the local government has failed for 15 years. He’s embarrassed his betters and must be punished for it. Fly-tipping is juuljust some clever bureaucrat’s way of getting him.
As others have said, fly-tipping didn’t happen so much when local authorities took care of our rubbish. Haven’t a problem with people and business being obliged to pay for the disposal of their stuff rather than dumping it on their neighbours or the impoverished third-word – our council taxes have more deserving demands. There will always be some, however, that will ignore the rules – and while I’m not above borrowing nextdoor’s JCB to dig holes and bury stuff, in the spirit of Les Anderson I would probably sanction a shoot-on-sight ruling for the cowboys that fly-tip hereabouts, and if that includes an armed Waste Crime Unit then so be it.
“Don’t worry, we won’t take the piss out of you with this lovely new eco-tax.”
There is no alternative. If you allow people to buy stuff and then expect them to dispose of it correctly at the end of its life, which costs them money, then human nature says ‘No I’m not going to dispose of this sofa in the correct manner, which will cost me £50 (and/or considerable amounts of my time and effort), I’m going to pay some pikey £5 to take it away, full well knowing he’s going to fly tip it in a layby. Or maybe even chuck it there myself’.
Try walking up and down the roads of the UK and see the horrendous amounts of crap that the human scum chuck out of their moving vehicles. I personally have to deal with this on a constant basis. So colour me unsympathetic to the idea that the consumer should be trusted to dispose of their waste correctly, and as they can’t be relied on to do it right of their own free will then they’ll have to pay up front and maybe get some of that money back when they do the right thing. We’ve tried letting people have the freedom to dispose of their waste as they see fit, and look what they’ve done with it.
Why not just burn, bash and bury the junk. In the brave old days of yore, the peasouper was common in England’s green and pleasant land, so you’re used to it. (You’ll have noticed I live in Oz.)
Since the UK is a couple of large islands, if there’s no available holes, just dump it in the ocean. I’m sure there’s some old records telling where they intended to dump radioactive waste before the grand fuss. So just toss it in there.
Collect it all, shred it, extract the metal and burn it for electricity generation.
Job done.
“Collect it all, shred it, extract the metal and burn it for electricity generation.”
Except no-one wants to live near the waste burner do they? The Uk is a crowded island, finding suitable locations for plants that spew out toxic fumes (I don’t believe the ‘Oh the smoke is all scrubbed of anything toxic and perfectly safe to breathe’ brigade, they aren’t going to have to live next door to the things) , stink and have hundreds of heavy lorries coming in and out 24/7 is not going to be possible is it?
Last I looked (or smelled), landfill sites have all of those attributes – with the added advantage that a plasma furnace on site can also work through the historical shit too.
“Last I looked (or smelled), landfill sites have all of those attributes”
Except a landfill site will eventually fill up, and be capped and allowed to revert to nature. So the people living by it don’t have to put up with the detriment forever. On the other hand an incinerator would be permanent – even if the plant wears out, a new one will be built on the existing site because the reasons it was built there in the first place still apply.
Maybe we should have mobile incinerators, and everyone has to put up with one for a few years eventually, even the great and the good in the expensive parts of the country. Something tells me that if likes of the David Cameron in the Cotswolds had to endure that, incinerators would suddenly go off the agenda…….
Well he some good out bad. If ask council do it would another 15 for them to meeting about meet to have meetings about it what should of was great what can for to help.
I had a broken washing machine. Late one night, I trundled it to the end of the road. It was gone next morning. The system works and I didn’t have to pay anyone
Jim: “I don’t believe the ‘Oh the smoke is all scrubbed of anything toxic and perfectly safe to breathe’ brigade, they aren’t going to have to live next door to the things) , stink and have hundreds of heavy lorries coming in and out 24/7 is not going to be possible is it?”
Depends on how …amenable to shortcuts… (local) government is.
The lorry problem is solved by putting the things up on industrial estates. The real ones where other heavy industry is, and the whole Lorries, Noise and Smell thing is a given anyway.
And if you burn stuff right ( an art in itself, but…) you end up with CO2 and water vapour as the exhaust. There’ll always be traces of Other Stuff, but they’re at a concentration that makes daffodil-strewn public spaces ( or pine/eucalyptus/rhododendron copses, or fields o’ heather.. pick your literal poison…) more dangerous than what comes out of that chimney.
And you can have centralised places that are specialised in cooking/burning the really nasty stuff. One plant does not necessarily have to do it all. Specialisation pays off..
It’s the system we use most in Clogland, since we don’t have the space for Big Holes.
Local municipal incinerators, usually serving multiple municipalities ( with each their collection/sorting/recycling stations) that either generate electricity, or provide heat for municipal block heating. Sometimes both, depending on the season/weather.
And three BIG sites that take care of the Nasty Stuff.
And guess.. most people don’t even realise the things are there.. All they know is that for their municipal tax, the rubbish lorries come by twice a week, and stuff is Dealt With.
The local incinerator is just 3 miles from where I live, and most people don’t even realise it is there. And it produces far less Nasties than the major highway passing our city, or the harbours in it, the DuPont plant here, etc…
The tech to do it, and do it efficiently, is already present, tried and tested.
It’s just that people insist on re-inventing the wheel, because imagine taking up proven furrin’ practice.