Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Dumped!

September 3rd 2007

Has anyone started watching that new channel 4 show ‘Dumped’? It has been a bit gripping. Could not believe one of the contestants would wear a new pair of pants everyday and then throw them away, just ridiculous.

The premise for the show is that 10 volunteers are on an ‘eco mission’ most of them assumed it would be in Australia or the Amazon or something like that. They were then literally dumped on a Rubbish Dump somewhere near Croyden. On the first night they had a shelter but tonight’s saw them having to build there own and one has already left.

It reminded me of when I worked for Onyx total waste. It was a company in Hilsea in Hampshire (back in my Portsmouth days) I temped there and then ended up with a permanent job. Part of the training was to get sent out with the lads who dealt with all the skips and also the ones who deal with the local household waste. The latter was by far the worst. Skip sites are less in your face they leave a full skip for someone else to deal with and then get an empty one to deposit somewhere else. The worst of all the skips were the ones from the cruise ships, boy did they stink. However my second day of training held much worse in store.

I was up at bout 4am to be picked up at 5am. Not nice when you’re a bit of a surely 18 year old. I then had to don the ridiculously unflattering attire they wear all steel toe caps and fluorescents. Collecting the rubbish is easy but the amount people create over a week on one road does actually shock you (and this was 7 years ago) when you get to the tip it’s another thing all together. The smell is horrific, and the volume of waste is just astounding. Also what people through away, I love random rubbish so I could have spent months finding treasures (or the odd snake as they have on Dumped, some of the guys at Onyx used to find cat and dog bodies in the waste) on there as there are some good things people chuck. Now some of you will understand why I am such a recycling bore. Onyx planned to build three pyramids of waste that would be covered and turned into an attraction with Hampshire Council sadly this has never seen the light of day.

What I have loved about Dumped is the fact they show you the good stuff people do chuck, also the amount that could be recycled. Plastic bottles will degrade after around 60 years tin cans wont for hundreds and hundreds of years and that’s only if they come in contact with water and start to rust, also both these things can be recycled. Mr B thinks I am some kind of recycling Hitler, I even recycle receipts and price tags from clothes I have bought, I just think if you can recycle it bloody do it. They have found some treats on that programme and started to build a proper kitchen and house, its amazing. I hope they all last the three weeks, I wish I had known it was happening I would have volunteered.
Please watched Dumped, it will show you what our world waste is doing to just a small part of the country.

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