Heaven is a day spent sorting a cow-box full of rubbish at a Derbyshire recycling centre
MATTHEW PARRIS Rubbish has always fired my imagination and set my pulse racing. I don't know why; it may be an inherited trait. My late father used to rifle through our bins lest anything useful had been thrown away, and in unhappier circumstances might in old age have extended his research into the streets, parks and railway stations. Perhaps one of our ancestors was a vulture in another life.
Little gives me greater satisfaction than my old flip-flops — rescued (broken) from a crow-patrolled tip in Rurrenabaque in the remote Bolivian lowlands and lovingly repaired using some bailer twine and an old nail in place of a needle. The repair took most of an afternoon but I do not regret a minute of it: Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, and nothing useful survives long on a tip; I simply got there first. A sadness for me last year was when, in my absence abroad, my partner threw away and replaced my old washing machine, which was just short of its 30th birthday and worked perfectly well so long as you knew how to secure the door whose broken catch I had, with devilish ingenuity, replaced with a swivelling jam-jar lid bolted on to the pressed steel plate.
But fascination with the thrown-away extends beyond the pleasures of rescue and repair. Paradoxically, I also enjoy doing the throwing away. I positively look forward to bagging up the rubbish every Sunday evening, consolidating with fiendish energy — climbing into the dustbin and jumping up and down on its contents — until I can get two bags' worth into one. I'm always sorry when this part of the evening is over and it's time for bed, although the peeppeep-peep of the reversing garbage lorry at dawn in the morning affords me the special pleasure of turning over sleepily under the duvet and thinking of all that rubbish I remembered to pack into the minimum space, bag up, and carry down the drive.
So a highlight of 2007 came for me last Sunday afternoon. My first visit to the Derbyshire Dales District Council tip in Ashbourne. 'Tip', however, is hardly the word. This place is a state-of-the-art, precision-guided, cutting-edge, environmentally super-responsible recycling centre of the highest order.
I was horribly underdressed for the experience. Other householders arrived (in shiny 4x4s) wearing crisp work gloves, freshly ironed boiler suits or high-vis workman's jackets. I was wearing my frayed-collar 1970s Clydella shirt and old corduroys, horribly soiled by packing the rubbish; and towing my neighbour Jonathan's old cow-box with my Vauxhall pick-up truck.
Other householders would open polished tailgates to disclose (perhaps) three empty paint pots, a cardboard box and a length of unwanted timber, which they would gingerly extract. I brought two years' worth of cardboard packaging, a mountain of shredded expanded polystyrene, five boxes of crumbled plasterboard, an oven, a hob, a hood, a fridge, a forest of splintered timber studded with nails and screws, two television aerials, a kitchen fan extractor, a television, three chairs, about half a ton of 1980s fittedkitchen cupboards, several lengths of hose, a massive coil of ventilator pipe, six bags of garden waste, a big pine table, two doors, two crates of broken kitchen tiles, a cistern and a toilet. I was in paradise.
But I was unprepared for the scene which awaited me. Hopes were not high Experience over 30 years of trying to dump things at municipal sites is that whatever it is you want to dump is on their list of things you can't; and that anyway the question does not arise because they're only open on alternate Tuesdays from 13.30 to 15.30, towed trailers are not allowed, your vehicle is too high to get under a bar set at sports coupe height — and besides you would have needed three years of council tax statements plus a utilities bill addressed to you at your home address within the relevant local authority area. In which case you would be turned away on account of the fact that you'd visited this dump twice already within the last calendar year. So three cheers for Derbyshire Dales District Council. They seem to have franchised this operation out to a private contractor with a mission to make customers welcome, and — more than that — to turn rubbish-dumping into a high-tech pursuit of near-forensic precision.
As I came rattling under the boom, something like a space station greeted me. On a metalled surface about the size of a cricket ground there stood about a score of enormous containers, each painted a bright primary colour. Many had huge ramps surfaced in non-slip grilled steel, from tarmac level up to their brim. There were signs warning customers to take care; and walk, not run; and offering the help of a member of staff should we need assistance in carrying any item.
Each container was for a different category of rubbish: not just the usual four (paper, glass, plastic containers and newspapers) but wood, cardboard, MDF, hardboard, rubble, metals, furniture, electronic equipment, batteries, kitchen appliances, clothes .. . and more, no doubt, of which I made no note. There were also stands and special trolleys where one could place chairs, tables or machines for which further use might be found.
Admirable though this set-up was, I was unprepared for it. I had filled scores of big plastic sacks with miscellaneous garbage, and shovelled all the rest, unseparated and unbagged, in heaps into the cow-box. A fellow customer greeted me with surprise as I began to unload everything from pick-up and cow-box on to the tarmac for pre-dump sorting. Soon I turned my immediate surroundings into something resembling an unauthorised travellers' encampment: a mini eyesore, in sharp contrast to the tidiness all around. From time to time I would glance anxiously at the site operatives' Portacabin, half-expecting to be reprimanded — or, worse, expelled. But instead one of them strolled over to help me lift things. Slowly I was sorting myself out.
Two hours later the fellow customer who had greeted me at the start returned with his vehicle and a second load. I was by now covered in dust and grime, on my hands and knees on the tarmac, scrabbling up rubble in hopes of leaving my patch as clean as I had found it. Everything had been dumped in its rightful container. The table had been placed where useful furniture was lined up. The white goods were on their appropriate trolleys. And I was almost too weak to stand. 'Still here?' he said, with amiable incredulity. 'Nearly done,' I said, with exhausted pride.
With the site closing behind me I rattled off, hauling a now empty cow-box; aching, filthy, weak with hunger, and as happy as Larry. Fellow scavengers could now scavenge through the scavengings I had left behind. The sun set on a blissful day. Some talk of the Garden of Eden, the orchards of Kent or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; but for me the very name Ashbourne Recycling Centre' will always now ring sweetly in the ears.
Previous page
