Now that the Greens have been reduced to one lonely figure in the Dáil, isn’t it time that some of the mad, nonsensical, burdensome policies they and their daft EU allies forced on the long-suffering Irish taxpayer were re-examined?
You know of which I speak, for I suspect you too have spent many a frustrating hour in the dreaded queue for the Great and Holy Deposit Return Scheme machine – a dumb idea which has already wasted millions of hours of our time for no valid reason, and caused yet another giant annoyance in our already over-stretched lives: a pesky, stupid vexation perpetrated by the nanny state in conjunction with the original source of most of the pointless, endless interference in our lives, the EU.
This week, in a state of mind shifting between petulance and low-level exasperation, I hauled the great big, slightly smelly, slightly leaky, bag bulging with plastic bottles and cans into the back of the car, and dragging my youngest teenager with me, drove to the nearest supermarket to return the blasted stuff that I used to just conveniently place in the green bin.
When we got there, the car-park was unexpectedly busy, and there was a lot of awkward back-and-forthing before we got to the machine. It was out of order. Of course it bloody was.
We got back into the car and drove (carbon footprint comparing unfavourably to the quick-step around to the green bin by the side of the house) to the next place, which wasn’t out of order but had a long queue of people looking slightly annoyed but also a little bit martyred, perhaps offering up this wastage of their time, like a decade of the Rosary, to Blessed Eamon Ryan of the Lettuce Window Boxes and the Short Dáil Naps.
We joined the queue. A woman loaded bottle after bottle and can after can from a bag that seemed to hold a portal to another world where an invisible hand was feeding through the detritus of a long, wild, endlessly-fueled party. She suffered through the occasional refusal of a receptacle with good humour. Then we all shifted forward a spot in the queue. The machine got stuck. It just stopped. “Was it full,” we wondered, the good humour leaking away as we looked at our phones and calculated how long this was all going to take.
A man went for help, and after a minute, a cashier came forth to fix the machine, which she explained wasn’t full but just in a sort of sulk, much like me at this stage, and did something to make it chug back to operating while she ran back to her checkout.
We eventually got to the top of the queue. The bottles and cans sailed into the maw of the machine in that vaguely satisfying, semi-affirming way that leads you to think in innocent naivety: “This is not so bad, sure, we’re nearly finished now.”
But I was horribly deceived. The machine was clearly toying with me. It abruptly stopped, just as my mood had begun to lighten. (Maybe it has some sort of sensor). I couldn’t find the switch to turn it off and on again.
I traipsed off to beg the assistance of the young cashier who must be cursing the day that she agreed she’d do the course that made her the Deposit Return Scheme Machine Fixer-in-Chief. She duly obliged, explaining that one needs a magic key (my words) to jolt the contraption back to life.
We started the task anew. She had barely left a moment when the cursed, benighted machine stopped again. I could feel the hackles of the queue rising. There was shifting of feet, and tiny, truncated sighs of impatience because clearly I was a moron who was blocking up the machine because of my incredible ineptitude and inability to load a bagful of plastic bottles and cans like a normal, functioning human being.
Mortified, I asked the cashier to oblige once again and she came forth with the magic key once more. “Am I doing something wrong?” I asked. “Perhaps I am loading them incorrectly?”.
“No,” she replied in a weary and jaded tone, clearly fed-up with the whole situation. “It’s just a stupid machine.”
I felt like high-fiving her succinct and all-encompassing answer, but she had gone tearing back to the checkout again, where doubtless some of the customers were getting tetchy at the poor woman for the repeated calls on her time.
We deposited the rest of the recyclables. The whole farce had taken an age. “This is a joke,” I said to my daughter. “Those Greens are a fecking curse”. She rolled her eyes at me, partly because she was listening to music and not paying me any attention and who would blame her given I had said we’d be ten minutes, tops – and partly because I was giving out in public and being a cause of total mortification which, as every mother of teenage daughters knows, is the sole reason for our existence.
I drove home with a head of steam and then found that I had forgotten, in my annoyance, to buy the broccoli and the milk for dinner. I blame Eamon Ryan for that too.
But of course, there is no point blaming him because he has retired and left this frustrating, ridiculous scheme and these cursed machines standing like square, smug monuments to Green hysteria in every corner of the country.
“How can you be against recycling, Niamh?” I hear you say. I’m not. Of course I’m not. Who is? We were all recycling to beat the band before this nefarious scheme came about to nudge us a little bit closer to insanity.
As I wrote last September, the business of the Deposit Return Scheme “is just another annoying chore to fit into your day when we were already religiously adhering to the existing scheme – putting the recyclables into the green bin. Instead, we now having cans and bottles cluttering up the house and are obliged to hauled them off to the supermarket and wait in line to get a voucher to spend in said shop. For people who have to drive to the shop it makes even less sense of course, but green ideas never have to make sense, they just have to seem virtuous.”
It goes without saying that recycling is a good idea – though it’s not a new one. Mending and fixing, and passing things onto your siblings or your cousins, and scouring charity shops, was around long before someone decided to make a campaign of it. I completely agree that fast fashion is often unethical and that a throw-away culture is often driven by vanity and materialism, not need, but that doesn’t mean we have to pretend that every Green initiative is wonderful when, in fact, frequently they are nonsensical.
But forcing us to trudge to the Machine instead of using Green bins was essential, we were told, because some 30% of us were not recycling into said bins. Well, guess what? As I also indicated last September the early trends have not improved. The whole ghastly exercise hasn’t made the useless shower who won’t recycle any better at it.
Over 70% of people are bringing back their bottles and cans and getting their return on investment but about 25% of people don’t, Newstalk reported last week, wondering why this was the case. Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? Because they couldn’t be bothered.
Newstalk also spoke to a woman called Nikki who said that: “Generally speaking, it’ll be a good 10 or 20 minutes [waiting to return items] and I just find it a pain in the ass.”
“I would have recycled anyway and now I’m driving somewhere to stand there for an hour – it’s irritating – and so I would say that is the reason some people aren’t returning.”
I feel your pain Nikki. Our numbers are legion. In reality, the same people who were too lazy to sort stuff into their green bin aren’t going to wait in a queue for a deposit return. But the rest of us are being punished for their bad behaviour. And now we’re facing a green bin charge hike because the waste companies have lost their most valuable items in household green bins – the plastic bottles and the cans.
The Independent reported that the waste companies “say the bottles and cans are the most valuable items in household green bins and they are losing millions of euro in sales of these to manufacturers since the DRS began”.
Aluminium cans, which can be recycled indefinitely, are worth €800 to €1,400 a tonne on the recyclable materials market.
PET plastic, which is used in beverage bottles, loses quality the more it is recycled so it is worth less, but at around €500 a tonne is still a valuable material.
It is understood that waste companies are concerned about losing up to €15m a year in this way.
And, sure as night follows day, a waste company that is losing money, in this instance because of a government policy, must increase the cost to the customer. So, the 70% of people who already dutifully recycled into green bins now have all the inconvenience and annoyance of the Deposit Return Scheme, plus we must pay more to have our other waste collected. And the same number of people are still chucking their bottles and cans into the nearest hedge.
Can the new Cabinet, if it has any time to spare after endless rowing about speaking rights, please just scrap the Scheme. Just acknowledge the whole thing was a stupid mistake and let us go back to using our green bins in peace. Otherwise its only a matter of time before a real Rage Against the Machine begins.
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