the fourth place

Here is a particularly banal example of nanny statism in action. It's also an example of how the EU is encroaching into a our daily lives, not just with taxes and agrigultural tarrifs and that sort of thing, but our normal daily household chores and habits.

The Times reports that bugged are being fitted to wheelie bins as part of a scheme to encourage recycling. This is deeeply flawed (my emphasis):

The tag is screwed into a recess under the bin's lip. It contains a silicon chip with a serial number identifying the home to which it belongs.

This is detected by a sensor on the truck as the bin is lifted for emptying. The weight of the rubbish it contains is calculated by equipment on the truck. This information is then transmitted to a central computer.

The thing is, when I walk out of my house I pass several wheelie bins and I have no idea which is "mine". Sometimes I have access to two bins immediately outside my building (which contains two flats) and sometimes the nearest bin is situated between my building and the next giving one bin between four homes for that week. Which bin I use depends on the weather, what I'm carrying, and the amount of rubbish already in each bin.

How does a microchip link a bin to my home if I can't link my home to a bin? It's ludicrous. Assuming bins can be properly labelled and assuming the bin men will put them back in a place where they can be found on a Monday night I still have to work hard to ensure I'm not ripped off. How do I keep neighbours and passers by from depositing rubbish in the bin, currently kept on the pavement?

Here's an idea of what I think it would take to secure my waste-finances in my shared front garden:

• Dig away about 3m² of dirt maybe 40cm deep and lay paving in order to have a spot where the bin(s) could stand.
• Dispose of the waste topsoil.
• Put the rest of the garden in order, taking into account the change of layout.
• Repair the front gate.
• Repair the security lighting and consider the addition of CCTV (having effects on the privacy of my neighbours and therefore carrying significant responsibilities).
• Budget for a new variable bill each month.
• Locate additional space inside the home for additional dustbins into which bottles, tins etc can be sorted, this will probably involve changes to furniture to make space.

I'm simply not convinced that any of this has been thought about. I'll have to spend time negotiating with neighbours and updating the landlord (via an agency) and getting appropriate permissions. The total set-up cost including time could easily run to thousands of pounds.

Why are we bothering?

Councils face penalties of up to £150 per tonne of rubbish if they fail to meet recycling targets set under the EU landfill directive. This could lead to a bill of £230 million.

So heavy handed economic sanctions established by enviromentalists in the EU could cause massive disruption to the daily habits and front gardens of British homes. Bizarrely, as I mentioned above, this is likely to result in urban green spaces being paved over to give dustbins secure homes, resulting in rises in urban nightime temperatures and rises in the loss of carbon converting plants.

I titled this piece "Binning our liberties", not because I want to make drama out of these impositions, but because there are genuine infringments of choice and privacy.

Having your bin tagged means there is less deniability about what goes in there. A leaflet about a taboo disease. Your used condoms. Empty drink bottles. The contraversial literature you threw away. Credit card and bank numbers printed on discarded paperwork. All of this would now linked to you by virtue of the security measures you took to prevent your bin being ripped off.

This loss of privacy will put you on an invisible leash making you think twice as you enjoy the normal vices our society has to offer. It would also limits our economic choices. A scheme set up by the council backed by punative laws and drops in council tax levels is not the same as simple privatisation - a dead stop in state provision. It does not give us any more choice as consumers over who takes our rubbish away. It certainly does not improve efficiency as the layers of bureaucracy pile up, instead we are expected to act on our wallets without having the normal concomitant ability to vote with it.