Realise I've slipped a bit on my daily blogging. Nine days in and only on my sixth blog entry. I must try harder. This one is only going to be a short one as I should really be in bed.
Anne-Sophie and I lent a hand to Listowel Tidy Towns today in their 7pm meet-up and clean-up of the town. To be honest there didn't actually seem to be an enormous amount of litter to pick up, much less than other years, we were told, which is encouraging.
However, something that I've noticed generally is that illegal dumping still seems to be pretty common particularly in the countryside, which is unfortunate, as it utterly devastates the environment and detracts from people's (particularly mine) enjoyment of the idyllic surroundings. I noticed on one of my runs a few weeks ago that someone had dumped two bags of rubbish into a drain beside the side road I was on. On a random excursion to (and through, accidentally) the wind farm outside Tralee we found that somebody seemed to be using a little recess in the hill as their own personal landfill, and loose plastic bags and bottles had spread from there to a radius of several hundred metres. Not nice.
I have heard people saying that it is "the Polish" that are responsible for the dumping - a conclusion that has been reached upon finding substantial quantities of Eastern European food packaging in bags of waste, although I'm pretty certain that the Irish aren't squeaky clean either. I might add, however, that when we forgot to take our bins in from the street one day (in fact they had been forgotten about by our bin collection service so we were hoping that they'd come back for them - they didn't), we found two black sacks were very kindly deposited in our bin by a passing opportunist. An examination of the contents of the bags revealed that they were not stupid enough to leave an address in there, although did confirm the presence of products that looked (to me) to be Polish in origin. I also discovered they have a child of about two, judging from the nappy packaging, that they have at least one dog, they smoke, drink a certain brand of beer and they were complete douchebags. The last conclusion was reached not solely from the crime of firing their rubbish in our bin (although I am glad they disposed of it there rather than chucking it into a field), but the worst of it was the fact that the greater part of the items in the bags were recyclable. For free. In the car park around the corner from my house. Meaning that it couldn't be a question of price or of distance, merely a question of abject laziness and pure ignorance. I'm getting angry just thinking about it.
I have noticed in my travels, particularly around Europe that waste disposal seems to be a service which appears to be free, although I imagine it comes out of the counties' taxes. Skips for both recyclables and rubbish are left at strategic locations in cities and on roadsides in the country and the public can fire their unwanted items in and they are collected on a fairly regular basis. One person's waste may even be of value, and some bits and pieces do end up being saved from the landfill - in Greece I rescued four patio chairs, two rugs and a pair of brightly coloured cushions from various skips on the streets surrounding my house.
I don't see why a similar system isn't adopted here. It could help to save our environment and keep our tourist attractions pretty.
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