'The eels were climbing out of the water to die'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"It’s so expensive to dispose of waste legally that many people attempt to do it illegally."
This is one of those things where we just have to collectively bite the bullet and make it easy and cheap to dispose of things properly. Otherwise you get people dumping toxic waste in storm drains, throwing old tires and appliances in ravines, mixing dangerous contaminants into regular trash, or just putting their trash in other people's bins.
Where I am it costs $20 to properly dispose of an old can of paint. It costs about the same to dispose of any electronic item that has a screen. Even regular household garbage has to be put in special bags that cost about $2/each. All of this is a counterincentive to people disposing of their waste properly. And every few years the local waste manangement bureaucracy raises the rates.
Just build it into the base taxes that everyone pays. Make it "free" and easy for people to do the right thing.
You can also put the cost of disposal into the cost of the item at sale. Either through a deposit (like cans/bottles) or just a flat fee/tax.
Then you encourage people to buy less toxic, easier-to-dispose-of alternatives.
In addition, once a month there is a “punto limpio móvil” on each neighbourhood: a small truck from the city parks on a reserved spot for 2h to get the special waste from the neighbours, also for free.
You really need to not value your time at all to be willing to participate on those schemes.
No one is standing in line to return one bottle.
My local grocery store has a similar return system for glass milk bottles. You just turn them in at the register when you check out. Even simpler.
So if you have some old PC you need to get rid of, you just call the PC manufacturer and they send a pre-paid shipping label and box to your home and the mailman comes to pick it up at their expense.
Construction waste is also a major issue, insanely difficult to dispose of.
Having to take a dead TV 60 miles to pay Best Buy to dispose of it was a non-starter for basically everyone.
That’s a good way to discourage proper disposal.
Modern latex paints are accepted in normal household garbage in most cities if allowed to dry out first, but oil based paints should be collected at proper locations. It’s actually getting hard to find oil based paints for sale, but you want to encourage people to dispose of them properly. When someone discovers 10 old paints in the basement of an old house it shouldn’t cost $200 to dispose of them.
All of the counties I’ve lived in (USA) long enough to have material to dispose of have provided free hazardous waste collection sites. The only hassle was maybe dealing with the government employee who didn’t want to help you do the mandatory sign-in and the minimal paperwork some required.
My current city also has annual hazardous waste pickup days. They’ll advertise in your neighborhood with flyers explaining what they will collect and where to take it. Very convenient to drop it off locally.
Charging people for small scale disposal is a very bad idea.
One place I lived permitted placing small amounts (there were strict limits) of appropriately packaged hazardous waste (there were detailed instructions) on top of your bin at any time. It didn't apply to everything but it made safely disposing of batteries, fluorescent lights, and various other common household hazards quite convenient.
I don't know, my mind turns to enormous flytipping sites like this one: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdew6j2lxplo
I guess it's a kind of business that's behind these, but I don't think they're run by corporations.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/programs/special-wa...
The simple trash, recycle, compost stuff works because it is only 3 categories so you can have 3 different colored bags/bins. Adding in the special waste stuff is adding 10+ categories. We'd either need a full rainbow of bins or some special stickers to mark each item (which would be yet-another barrier).
While I'd love at-home pickup, what we really need is for people to just be better.
> Eels are pretty hardy, says Alistair; they can even travel over land if they need to. To see them gasping and dying on the banks was heartbreaking. “It was apocalyptic.”
> The results found unusually high levels of heavy metals, ammonia levels that were “well outside acceptable limits for any freshwater life” and nitrogen levels that were “toxic to all aquatic life”.
It's quite a long article that deals with many problems the UK has regarding environmental protection, illegal waste dumping and so on. The lack of care and amount of damage is just shocking.
I really recommend a read.
The water companies were privatized under Thatcher, for those missing the context.
Note that the waste dumping problems are not all caused by water privatization, either. But as with the comparison to criminals, that's often conflated when people talk about it.
The reality is that it's not solely the water companies, even though if you put it to them many people would leap on the comparison to the Mafia.
Yes I found there was some suspicion. The rest read to me as related thematic padding.
"concerning!"
TFA
Morgan Farms is burying waste on their property and failing to contain it while the EA (government regulators) are unwilling/unable to stop it.
As always The Guardian never met an irrelevant off-topic non-sequitur it didn't like! Can't delete, but I blanked the off-topic post. Thanks
Not only were many environmental regulations "written in blood" (and are well justified by observed damages before they existed), the average citizen would typically gain little from scrapping them. Allowing some industrialized chicken farm to dump their waste into the next river is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper. "Socialize (external) costs, privatize gains" is often the actual play instead.
Any. It's not going to make your eggs any cheaper.
The market is already bearing the existing price, so all that saved money is going in an executive's pocket.
If any idiot with a chicken could enter the egg business, eggs would be cheaper and more plentiful, but also less safe. Cheap importers would take over and probably start faking expiration dates and making people sick, but golly it'd be cheap. And contrary to you claims, it would also cause the richest execs in the business to lose their bonuses while the sketchy importers took over on slim margins.
I don't want that, but come on, you gotta admit the cost tradeoff is real.
If you wanted to dump shit on the riverbank in 1950 you'd just bribe/threaten officials with discretion or call in a favor from a friend of a friend to get approved and there weren't a ton of strings or hoops or recurring cost once you got it going.
To do it in 2026 you have to continually pay a bunch of middle men and compliance parties diffusing responsibility far and wide enough in the process that no one party can be held responsible because the lawyering it would take to drag that across the finish line would be more than you could recoup from said party, often helped by statutory limits to liability for all these middle men and compliance parties.
Focusing on the legality or compliance with rules of any one of the myriad of parties listed in the article or whining about the inaction of the enforcement agencies funding level is basically a red herring to rile up the useful idiots to clamor for more of all this. The more you pass rules that drive up cost the more you create room for additional middle men to diffuse responsibility if operating above the table and the more payoff you create for those who are willing to operate below the table.
Garbage disposal one of those areas where the modern regulatory state is an abject failure by anything other than the definitions of success cooked up by the regulatory state peddlers themselves. I don't know what the solution is. The paradigm it replaced was pretty bad too.
In Australia all the regulations exist and the waste management is top notch, insanely easily and fairly cheap.
The solution is electing a decent government.
Landfilling has been intentionally regulated into being non-viable in the UK and in many other places. They simultaneously regulate incineration which sets a high minimum price there (whether this is intentional depends on who you ask). This creates all your economic demand for "if we engage in a complex regulatory compliance scheme we can dump obviously bad but technically compliant from the POV of any one party dirt on a farm for a decade before we get shut down and all walk away pocketing an X% ROI" type crap like in the article comes from.
The northeast US and wide swaths of europe have the same problems too.
Having to pay those middlemen is a sign of the regulation working (because the cost for creating superfund sites is no longer zero), and all society has to do is increase enforcement rate/liability limits until the middlemen are more expensive than proper disposal.
Like I said, going back to the pre-regulation ways isn't a solution, that was pretty bad too.
at some point we’ll be living in a dust bowl eating barely nutritious food and people will think “man, how could the liberals have done this to us?”
I hear problems like this and I think of that Ministry for the Future answer. The strong no, in the most absolute terms.
Given they haven't made an episode in more than 30 years, they almost certainly don't.
> It's kind of wild that that strong ethos on TV feels missing. Or at least, I have no idea what similar type shows there would be.
IIRC, Captain Planet was pretty preachy and not actually that fun to watch. But oh my does this article sound like it describes a literal Captain Planet plot, I can just imagine that yellow guy laughing about how he's going to dump toxic waste in a stream.