From the BBC:
Skips could be placed on streets in a bid to tackle repeated fly-tipping, a council has announced.
Last year, there were more than 4,000 reports of illegally discarded waste across Walsall, with 2,000 tonnes of rubbish removed from the borough.
The local authority has now proposed putting a skip in each of its 20 wards every Saturday*. Clearing up fly-tipping cost the council more than £400,000 last year, bosses said.
And why on earth wouldn't they?
1. The cost of collecting rubbish is about 1% - 2% of the selling price of new goods sold, and so anybody who wants to chuck something away has paid for the cost of having it collected ten or twenty times over via VAT.
We take our larger items to a council recycling centre; they have signs up saying "Household refuse only". I really don't see why they draw this distinction, businesses have paid VAT just like anybody else and have the same entitlement to dump their rubbish.
2. The test of whether something is a good idea is to imagine the opposite situation, i.e. there are plenty of skips dotted around for people to dump larger items in, and let's assume most people do the decent thing and use them. Would any sane council announce that it intends to save a few quid by withdrawing the service? You'd hope not.
* I don't quite understand that sentence. Will the skips be there on Saturdays, or will they be emptied on Saturdays?
About That Closet
2 hours ago
5 comments:
Do they make more than £400,000 from commercial waste licences? If not, they should let businesses use the dump as well.
M, I don't know and I don't see the relevance. It can be covered by business rates and vat. I don't mean huge scale industrial waste, just normal junk.
Why is it that people who work for the State and draw up legislation never seem to understand higher order effects? They seem to think 'If I pass a law making X illegal everyone will stop doing it, and no one will ignore the law (even though its virtually unenforceable), nor will they change their behaviour and do something that gets round the new law'?
I remember decades ago when landfill taxes and waste disposal laws were introduced I said then that fly tipping would be the result, and look where we are. Its hardly rocket science to predict that if you make getting rid of stuff expensive and complicated some people will take to chucking it in the nearest hedge.
S, buggered if I know.
"Why is it that people who work for the State and draw up legislation never seem to understand higher order effects?"
I saw a partial answer to this in a comment on a forum (dealing with a completely different subject, but it is still relevant here): when presented with a problem faced by others, people tend to assume that those others will react to that problem in the same way as they themselves would and so put forward the course of action that they would follow to solve that problem. However, very few people are aware that they do this.
So, given that, on the whole, law makers tend to think and act differently to law breakers, it is not so surprising that we get stupidities just like the one that you have described.
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