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SCMP Reporter

London
Where there's muck there's brass. Doing the rounds as a London dustman pays more than doing the rounds as a postman; plumbers always earn more than carpenters.
Most London nightclubs now have a toilet attendant raking in up to GBP100 (HK$1,590) a night in tips, ample compensation for keeping the cubicles clean and punters fresh (albeit reeking of cheap aftershave).
Now London local authorities are sniffing an opportunity: in rubbish and household waste.
With growing concern over global warming, not to mention the GBP3 billion in EU fines looming for councils that dump too much waste in landfills, targets are being set to raise recycling rates and slash collection costs in the process.
The politics of rubbish is becoming just that: rubbish. The setting of targets to cut waste is prompting bizarre, often farcical, remedies and largely unforeseen consequences.
A recent report by the Economic and Social Research Council showed that the free collection of garden waste was popular because it could be counted as recycling, even though it raised the amount of rubbish collected.
Door-to-door council collection of recyclable waste - tins, plastic, clothes, batteries, glass, paper and now food scraps - is mandatory, but the capital, with more than half its residents living in hard-to-access low- and high-rise flats, is finding it hard to improve recycling rates, now stuck stubbornly at 20 per cent of the 3.3 million tonnes of London's annual household waste. (Still, it's progress - it was just 8 per cent five years ago).
Some boroughs want to force more recycling, through fewer collections, more fines and allocating rubbish allowances or pay-as-you-throw  taxes.The latter was given the government's go-ahead yesterday for pilot projects.
This month, Hammersmith  &  Fulham borough in west London hired  inspectors to start rifling through bins for waste that should be recycled. A GBP100 fine awaits the householder who can't separate his tins of Stella from his sprout tops.
Some councils want to restrict householders to smaller rubbish bins, which has led to fears of neighbours dumping rubbish in the bins next door in the dead of night or starting back garden bonfires.
Other authorities plan to introduce bins with digital chips to weigh the refuse. Ealing, also in west London, has  devised a camera hidden in a baked bean tin to snoop on  illegal dumpers.  Some say it is only a matter of time before the cameras spill the beans on those not recycling. But problems  lie ahead if councils  increase the number of collections.
Kensington &  Chelsea, west London, which is introducing three collections a week, should heed recent claims that councils can't find enough recycling plants to treat their waste, forcing some to dump tins and bottles in landfill sites.
There's also the fact that recycling plants, working way above capacity, can't afford the time to separate badly collected goods. The result? Landfill.
Other councils, first to heed now-jettisoned government advice, have restricted refuse collections to once a fortnight.
Whereas council binmen were once seen as the cavalry, collecting and disposing of odious waste, now they are being assaulted by residents unhappy at the rise in rats and foxes rooting through bags left outside for a fortnight.
It is easy to dismiss such people as habitual moaners, but recent research by the World Health Organisation showed that food waste left to rot for 14 days can foster bugs  similar to those found in bubonic plague.
If you think that's bad, spare a thought for the now-requisite blue compost bin, full to the brim each week with rotting, decomposing scraps of food. Now imagine the fruit flies and penicillin factory within if the blue box is kept in your kitchen, for 14 days at a time, in high summer. Had enough? No? Then imagine cleaning it out every fortnight to avoid the stench.
Someone, some day, is going to make a lot of money cleaning out these blue bins. As they say, where there's muck, there's brass. And fruit flies.



A war on waste as boroughs grow rotten