Bury it in a big hole...

You see, I can't see the problem in burying rubbish in a big hole.

When ah wor nobbut a lad our school used to force us at gunpoint to do cross country running in the vain hope that it would somehow make us all super fit athletes and blow some of the cigarette smoke out of our young lungs.

Neither aspiration came to fruition but we actually grew to enjoy our cross country runs after we discovered, just down a small path and through some trees, only a small diversion off our supposed route, an old quarry that the council had just finished filling to the brim as a landfill site.

Part of the quarry wall was still standing at one end and the rest of the landfill had been covered with a couple of feet of roadstone hardcore to cap off all of the household rubbish and presumably pretend that all was fine in the world and at some point in the not too distant future the council would be able to sell the rubbish tip to a developer for a new housing estate.

Non of those council machinations bothered us, the filled in, capped-off quarry made a great battleground for throwing stones at each other.

As word of our intense battles grew week on week, more and more boys volunteered for the cross country runs so that eventually a passer-by, walking down the quiet country lane would hear yelps of pain, whoops of joy and the crack of roadstone upon bones as a hundred or so young twelve year old boys clad in running vests and shorts gathered for an hour in an old quarry to throw stones at each other.

Old Sinbad Simpson the PE teacher was delighted by his cross country ideals, fortunately he was too bone idle to follow us on the route that he insisted we use, if he had then he would have been puzzled to discover no-one actually running upon it, apart from Johnson and Denton the school swots who took cross country running too seriously - we dragged them into the quarry one day and gave them the stoning of their young lives.

So back to todays topic...

British rubbish is being sent to China for recycling and "green" people are getting into all sorts of a lather over it, claiming that sending rubbish halfway around the world, and then quite likely sending the recycled stuff all the way back again - is sort of defeating the object of being green in the first place.

I agree.

Landfill is a much better option in this country.

I've heard the argument that we're fast running out of landfill sites to landfill - absolute tosh - theres loads of holes to fill in this country, and if they can't find holes, why not use a genuine valley or two ?

Filled with household rubbish and capped off with two foot of roadstone, Wharfedale will serve the next generation of cross country schoolboy runners with stone throwing practice for decades to come, then we can build houses on it.

I really should be running this country you know.