Litter picker

The last couple of days I’ve been working with Mark, an ex-squaddie and ex-grave digger. He was in Gulf War part one where he drove over a mine, and he quit the graveyard after having four bereavements in close succession making his job a little too subjective for comfort. He has a rather manic look about him – scrunched up face and a very low gravelly voice – and when I was first introduced to him I’ll admit to being pretty wary. But it’s all turned out rather well with him being probably the most interesting and open guy I’ve working with since starting temping. Wednesday it was just the two of us in the truck and I felt comfortable enough to talk about all sorts of stuff. Usually I keep my brains in disguise which means I tend to come out of a week’s temping desperate for an intelligent conversation, so it’s nice not to be on guard so much this time.

A few clarifications on Monday’s post. I’m actually working for the Street Cleaning division at the depot. The current workload is higher because of the You Are Your City campaign being run by the council where thanks to an injection of central government money a number of areas are being blitzed. The rubbish collected by us is sorted and recycled where possible, which was a relief as a lot of it is wood or rubble, and I took a photo of the depot today. The large structure in the middle is the ‘hopper’ where all the household garbage goes to be compacted down before being moved elsewhere.

The Tuesday and Wednesday (I’m writing this before work on Thursday) were mainly spent little picking in alleys removing stuff that hadn’t been touched for at least 15 years. I know this because we found a Marathon wrapper. Sometimes this is a real grin-and-bear it job as this stuff stinks, especially if it’s covered in dog shit, but I’m getting used to it. I started Wednesday trying to dodge the shit but soon gave up, just making sure I keep my gloves on when working and off when not.

I’d been wanting to sound out the full timers about their attitude to the job so I told Mark about the Shit and Civilization course I blogged about last month, the basis of which being that you can judge how advanced a civilization is by how it deals with it’s refuse. He agreed completely and said how important the job was. People say to him he’s wasting his time, that it’ll all be back tomorrow but he knows that if he didn’t do this job it’d just build up.

I did have a few moments today of righteous indignation against all who litter – helped by the fact that I don’t ever drop rubbish on the streets – hatching plans for a form of National Service whereby every school leaver has to do 6 months straight little picking before moving on to work or college. Quite often when we were driving around Mark would point to a grass verge commenting that he’d cleared that a month ago and look at it now. I did look at it and while there was a fair bit of rubbish there it didn’t look malicious, more that it had accumulated there over time – a sweet wrapper here, a carrier bag there. I wouldn’t be surprised if a reasonable proportion of littler was just the inevitable result of a dense population – I try not to spill food onto the kitchen floor but after a week it needs sweeping.

The one thing I am sure about it that society uses far too much plastic. When you’re clearing rubbish that has been there the best part of a decade and the plastic bags are pretty much intact you know there’s an issue here. This stuff ain’t going away. I’m considering petitioning our government to follow Ireland’s example and tax the things into the stratosphere. I was chatting to an Irish guy at one of the NEC jobs about how Ireland was being used by the EU to try out loads of new legislative ideas (such as banning smoking in pubs) as payback for having received so much regional development money, most of which were ill thought out and dumb, but he agreed that the plastic bag one had been on the money. Bring it on, I say.