Marking Time

The ‘Pay by Weight’ system will be introduced in the new year for domestic refuse collection in most parts of Ireland. This initiative is an incentive to dump illegally and will probably lead to an increase in illegal dumping activity.

When we were paying the flat rate, no matter how much waste we produced it would be taken away, so we had no incentive to dump illegally. The goal of the new system is to encourage us to produce less waste. I don’t think this makes sense and I don’t think it will work.

For all our sloppiness and ambivalence towards the environment I do not believe we are producing significant amounts of waste just for the fun of it. We are a very materialistic and highly consumptive society and large amounts of waste is an inevitable side effect of this.

Putting financial barriers in the way of people attempting to dispose this waste legally is not going to solve the problem. It just makes it more economically viable for them to dump illegally.

I think that some of the biggest mistakes people make even at the highest architectural levels come from having a weak or broken understanding of a few simple things at the very lowest levels. You’ve built a marvelous palace but the foundation is a mess. Instead of a nice cement slab, you’ve got rubble down there. So the palace looks nice but occasionally the bathtub slides across the bathroom floor and you have no idea what’s going on.

Joel on Software - Back to Basics

That’s where I am at work these days. I replace a light bulb and the toilet stops flushing.

Frank McDonald believes something historically unprecedented is under way. “What is going on across the board in this country is immensely destructive,” he says. “The level of house-building spells catastrophe for scenic landscapes and the countryside in general if it continues.” Moreover, “transport is the fastest-growing contributor to climate change and here we are building motorways. It’s completely insane. It’s quite clear to me that by 2020 this country will be completely destroyed. And by that stage people will say, ‘Oh my God - look what we’ve done.’ But by then it will be too late.”

The Guardian