FarmYard Manures - worth it ?

On that point it really gets my goat when the youngsters bang on about the older generations being wasteful and destructive.

As a kid I clearly remember we all used to take glass bottles back to get 5 or 10p back per bottle. I remember people buying most stuff second hand, and I remember scrounging discarded timber from the back alleys to build stuff. Food was never wasted, and most fruit and veg was whatever was in season at the time.

Nowadays the young folks take to the interweb on their brand new phones that they'll replace the instant a newer model comes out to complain about us all, while simultaneously insisting that we should all live off tofu and other eco products that grow on the other side of the planet, in cleared rainforests, pumped full of pesticides because that's more eco than eating a grass fed cow's bum muscles.

 

I think you need to look back at certain decades.
50s, 60s and 70s I'd say we all made do and mend, but sometime during the 80s or 90s things changed, the throwaway society got going and it all turned into disposables.

There are probably different ways you look at this depending on age but things really have slowly turned from reuse to disposables.

 

People started to earn more money I think. And American culture started to really kick in.

I'm a bit young to remember the 70, seeing as I only saw about half of it, but I seem to remember that snobbery was something that happened in the few wealthy areas. By the late 1980s even people from humble hard working backgrounds, like those in our very working class street, started competing with each other to see who was poshest. It's a funny thing because I don't think it was a gradual thing. People my age and older as kids would be completely baffled by kids just a couple of years younger. We took great pride in the contraptions we'd made ourselves out of all sorts of rubbish, riding dilapidated bikes that we'd tarted up with bread bag tags and other such rubbish, while kids just a couple of years younger obsessively played with brand new toys made popular by the latest usually American TV program.

 

In the lead up to the incinerator being built I know there was major concern about the fly ash it would produce, so it's obviously not just coal. The rest of the ash goes to landfill.

Not only plastics, more recently there has been concern about paper and cardboard containing aluminium for instance, so should we be composting any of it?

Again, the Isle of Man is not the antiquated place many Brits think it is. I lived there for 24 years and in all that time and before, the island's amenity sites recycled as much as possible and still do. Anything that was taken there including plastic flower pots, fridges, wooden doors, hi-fi systems and bicycles were all considered recyclable. Often there would be people waiting for the gates to open to claim items that could be repaired, reused or stripped to create something else. Why doesn't the rest of Britain allow this? It would cut down on landfill and incineration.

 

Years ago, our local tip was just some unguarded skips next to the allotments. We and others used to go there whenever we saw fit, and see what we could scrounge. All above board. My greenhouse on my allotment cost me a couple of quid. That's what I paid for the polythene sheet. The actual structure, in its entirety, was made out of old doors and random timbers I'd found at the tip. My mate built an awesome hi fi out of bits he'd scrounged. I remember him finding a massive amp. He was over the moon. It was about 250 watts RMS, that's like almost commercial scale. It didn't work but we were both studying electronics at college at the time. About a fivers worth of components from Maplin soon had it back to its former glory.

You can't do that any more. The 'recycling centres' are now like jail's. Huge fences, CCTV, access by appointment only, and staff everywhere watching your every move. We've gone backwards.

 

We have had an incinerator for probably 30yrs just outside town, there was big objections at the time, but mostly about emissions , Dont think anyone was worried about ash.

At the same time recycling kicked off, I just think these places get overwhelmed and stuff goes for incineration because the recycling side cant cope, but nobody is going to admit to that.

 

As always, follow the money. Recycling is a fantastic idea. I remember as a kid, watching a local worthy with green intentions, collecting handfuls of read newspapers for repulping, loading them into the boot of her new Range Rover V8, its engine left running as she darted from house to house.
It is always fun to ask your local councillor how much profit they make in recycling. The fact is that there is none. It costs several times more than to landfill in bulk. The trade in recycled raw materials that need preparing before use is subsidised at your expense both in tax and increased costs of goods. Glass bottles are collected, transported, crushed, graded and sold at half the price of sand and then buried under block paving and such.