Ah, the Environmental Services! Sounds like some kind of eco-army and in a way it is. This week, and probably next, I’m a bin man and I’m pretty happy about it. Riding around small streets in a big truck lugging stuff into the back of it – who could be happier?
Currently I’m on Clearing, which involves removing the large piles of rubbish you often see illegally dumped about the place. An Environmental Health Officer goes around the city taking photos and doing risk assessments (presence of rats, asbestos and urgency of removal) and then a team of clearance operatives, well, clear it. As you can imagine it’s pretty dirty work but I actually find it more enjoyable than a factory or warehouse job.
The day didn’t start well. For some reason I wasn’t able to get to sleep on Sunday night (my body clock is, as ever, pretty screwed up) and finally drifted off at about 5.00am. At 7.20 my phone went off with the usual call from the agency to check I was on my way. I was asleep. Work started at 7.30. Ironically this was the first job I’d had from the agency in my local area and I was going to be late for it, but thankfully I was able to get there pretty sharpish. Turned out all three temps were late so I wasn’t in too many bad books, but even so, bit of a fuckup.
My companions for this adventure were Dave, a cheerful talkative 18 stone man who’d been working there for 10 years and Charles, and agency driver who’d never driven a dump truck before. Charles and Dave – I think I can remember that. Usually there’s just one team on clearance but there’s a lot of work on hence the temps. We headed off just after eight to our first location, a terraced street in Aston, to clear the front garden. I say garden but it was one of those concrete front-of-house areas that was filled up with building rubbish. I’m not sure exactly why the council clears this stuff other than that it’s a health hazard and I suspect they try and bill the home owner, but it did seem a little odd to be removing rubbish from private property. Still, we cleared it into the truck and then went off for breakfast.
Charles was quite surprised by this but Dave assured us it was quite normal. In fact he kept telling us to slow down and take our time. Breakfast was in a classic dive of a cafe that seems to exist solely for the use of bin men and there they all were in their hi-viz jackets, like a motley crew of pirates on shore leave, eating fried breakfasts, drinking tea, farting and swearing and smoking. Dave introduced me and it turned out most of them live in my area, which was a little worrying. I kind of like the idea of being anonymous in Kingstanding and suddenly I was being welcomed as a local. However, while the cafe may have appeared to house a wretched hive of scum and villainy I was bought two cups of tea and given a cigarette. This is what I like about the bins – in other jobs these guys would be miserable and bitter about their shitty jobs but here they’re quite happy, and that’s a good thing when you’re a temp.
It soon became apparent why they’re so happy. Working for the council on the bins in this city is a slackers paradise compared to most of the jobs I’ve done. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing as you have to remember that these guys spend their days shoving up stinking garbage, but the pressure was definitely not on. Most private sector jobs are on a time deadline and breaks are strictly regulated, but not here. After breakfast, which lasted half an hour but only because we’d had a late start (usually it’s an hour) we trundled back to the terrace to clear another front garden where an old lady gave us each a pound to take her flymo away. My first back hander!
The job is a bit weird in that we’re clearing away rubbish that people haven’t bothered disposing of themselves. Fly-tipping is of course illegal and there’s a system of fines in place, but in practice it’s not hard to dump stuff in the middle of the night and eventually it has to be gotten rid of by the council. Because the council will sort it out there’s a kind of catch-22 going on. Clear it and people will assume stuff dumped gets cleared so it’s okay to dump. Don’t clear it and you’ve got a health hazard.
There’s also an uncomfortable racial edge to this. Charles, who was surprisingly surprised by the scale of the job, asked why this happened so much in this area and Dave matter-of-factly blamed it on the Asians. Solihull (predominantly white and affluent) doesn’t have this problem while Aston (predominantly asian and poor-ish) does. There are no doubt many many reasons why this is so but it’s hard to argue with the stark evidence in front of you, especially as you’re shoveling it up. A few years ago when I last lived in Brum I worked for the council as a gardener often clearing parks of litter and the same racial thing came up again. Parks in Asian areas were filthier than those in white areas yet they were cleared on a more regular basis. Like I said, this is quite uncomfortable for a good liberal like myself. It’s not like these areas a neglected by the council – on the contrary they probably get more attention having a larger density of council property. Big hmmmmm.
But back to the job and after clearing a burnt-out yard by a railway bridge we went back to the depot for lunch. The depot is quite impressive in a Soviet kind of way. The general refuse is dumped in this huge monolithic structure where it’s compacted and taken away to the landfil – it’s like a massive concrete food processor with hundreds of birds roosting at the top. Photos will have to be taken. After lunch our schedule was changed and we moved to a tail-gated struck to go and collect some fridges. An area of wasteland behind some shops is to be cleared over the next fortnight using JCBs but before this started the fridges and tires needed to be removed as they can’t go into the crusher. The fridges because of the CFC gas and the tires because they’ll explode (and probably shouldn’t go in the landfill).
Before leaving we had to empty the dust truck we’d be using all morning which involved reversing out of the depot to drive over the weighing platform. As Charles was turning there was a loud bang as the wing mirror brushed against a fence and sprung heavily against the window, shattering it and covering me in glass. Thankfully it was safety glass so it just crumbled into squares rather than shards but it was all very exciting and I had to strip off to get it out of my shirt.
Then, after a farce of losing the keys between the two trucks for half an hour, we finally went off to get the fridges. The wasteland was again fascinating – I’m not sure why I love random collections of semi-industrial junk but I do. We collected the seven fridges and their doors (there’s more CFC in a fridge door than in the body apparently) and went back to the depot. By then it was getting close to 3.00pm so we knocked off for the day. Not much point going out again for the last hour really.
And that was my first day clearing fly-tips. I got home, had a shower and went to bed, waking up at midnight. At least this way I won’t be late for work today…
“blame it on the asians”
Yeah, I live in an area like that, too. People go on about the Asians, or shared households or whatever — but the people who make the biggest messes (I think) are small businesses run by people who reckon that because Asians (students, blacks, dole scum, whatever) live round here, it’s a rubbish area and therefore I can just leave my rubbish there, no-one’s going to care, they’re all filthy anyway.
Then they go home to pebbledash houses in the suburbs crawling with rotweillors, smug in the conviction that anyone living round there expects it, deserves it, and are probably doing ti themselves, anyway.
You want to be a binman, then? We have binmen-philosophers round here. Examining rubbish can be very stimulating to thought.
Racial overtones of trash-collection is nothing new in Houston and I think Jeremy has hit on one of the problems. You can always blame it on the other guy. Derelict land is always in the poorer districts.
That being said, some ethnic groups do seem to be more trash tolerant than others. I was most surprised by this when visiting Native American lands in New Mexico. They (and no-one else lives close enough!) seem to dump everything on the side of the road. So much, I thought, for their sincerity to the natural environment. But maybe the rest of us are to blame for the way we have treated them?
Trash collection is getting quite scientific in Texas. First of all, the “Don’t mess with Texas” anti-litter campaign did its research, examining trash on the roadsides and making statistical conclusions about who drops what and where. The results allowed the state to specifically advertise their message on TV and in magazines. No surprise that the main target seems to be the white red neck with an open pickup truck bed full of empty beer cans!
Then there is the new fear of stolen identities. What better way to assume an identity for fraud than by going through people’s trash – old bills, credit card slips, etc. Soon we’ll be shredding everything (ah, you say, compost it!).
And finally, our friendly h0meland secur1ty people no doubt go through our trash just to be sure that we’re not members of a terrorist organization.
I think rubbish intolerance has more to do with poverty than race – perhaps the poverty has something to do with race though? I live in a run down former mining village and there’s loads of rubbish – a vicious cycle of not giving a shit and so having a neighbourhood you don’t feel like giving a shit about. I’m quite envious of this temp assignment though. As long as you don’t end up with that twat Moyles helping out.