Have a miserable Christmas you bastards

Seasons greetings indeed.

Parents warned not to ‘hang baubles on Christmas tree’ in leaflet issued by Ed Balls’ staff

Whatever you do this Christmas, don’t let the children into the kitchen while you are cooking the turkey.

Always finish your drink to avoid a youngster having a taste and ending up with alcohol poisoning.

And, of course, never hang baubles on the tree. They might break and give someone a nasty cut.

These ‘tips’, from a list of gratuitous health and safety advice issued yesterday, came not from a misguided town hall jobsworth, but with the authority of Children’s Secretary Ed Balls.

Mr Balls’s officials have printed 150,000 leaflets designed to look like advent calendars, to be distributed through shopping malls and children’s centres ‘to help make the festive season safe’.

Just eat shit and die, blinky.

Government tells people to replace wrapping paper with pieces of old cloth

As Christmas day approaches millions of people will be buying sparkling, patterned paper to make presents look pretty.

But the total waste wrapping paper the UK produces over Christmas could stretch to the moon if each sheet was laid end to end.

And so the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is advising people to take on a Japanese tradition by using old pieces of cloth instead.

The Government body in charge of cutting waste is concerned that we send 10,734 tonnes of Christmas wrapping paper to landfill every year.

Part of the problem is the most popular wrapping paper is often dyed, laminated and contains non-paper additives such as gold and silver coloured shapes or glitter which cannot be recycled. This means paper is either dumped in the bin or, worse, put in the recycling bin, which will mean the whole lot is contaminated and has to go to landfill.

The Daily Telegraph revealed last week that more than 200,000 tonnes of recycling is already sent to landfill every year because of the problem of contamination.

At the moment there are also fears that more recycling is going to landfill because the economic downturn means it is difficult to sell on used paper, plastic or aluminium.

Many councils have been given permission to use old warehouses or even Military of Defence sites as extra storage space over the Christmas period in the hope the market picks up again. If it does not there are fears waste operators will be left with no option but to dump the material in landfill.

Established as a not-for-profit company in 2000, WRAP is backed by government funding from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

Oh yes, because we were stitched up for landfill targets by the EU, based on bad science. So thence came the idiot recycling schemes, which are now going bad because the Chinese don’t want any more of our shitty waste, and burning waste for energy is ruled out by… yes.. the EU.

Any which way, we pay.

In what could have been a fine piece of journalism, Simon Neville and Christopher Hope in The Daily Telegraph today lifts the lid on the council recycling scam revealing that more than 200,000 tons of recyclable household rubbish is being dumped in landfill sites or sent to incinerators each year.

Furthermore, Neville and Hope tell us, the amount dumped this year is expected to rise sharply as councils struggle to sell recyclable waste during the economic downturn.

The fact the recycled material is being dumped is, of course, not new. It has been discussed on this blog numerous times, and in not a few newspapers. But this is the first time an attempt has been made to quantify the scale of the dumping.

…

This is entirely a child of the EU. It was devised by the British government as a means of forcing local authorities to recycle and thus to avoid the swingeing EU fines that will accrue if we do not cut landfill. But, with it standing at £32 per ton, councils are potentially spending an extra £6.4million sending recycling to be dumped. Since landfill tax will rise to £40 per ton next year, the potential cost spirals to £8million.

Thus, we are in a classic EU vice. If we do not recycle, we pay massive fines to the EU. But since we cannot recycle, because the bottom has dropped out of the market, we pay massive amounts for recyclable waste to be collected, then we pay silly amounts to have it stored and then, when the storage space runs out, we pay for the landfill tax when it has to be disposed. Then we also pay massive fines to the EU.

AJ

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