At the moment in the UK we have an ongoing debate about recycling. In particular the recycling of our household rubbish. We are reaching that point where Local Government Authorities are to be fined for not meeting their recycling targets. The councils are not getting the blame for this but the householders. The householders are being told that they are not recycling according to Council instructions. The debate going on is how to encourage a greater awareness amongst us to recycle. This debate is moving towards forcing people to recycle.
How do you force people to recycle. Simple answer is to fine them. That way you have another revenue stream! To this end it has just come to light that one Council has installed sensors into people’s wheelie bins without their knowledge. These sensors detect what type of rubbish is being added to the bin. The idea being that if recyclable material was added then the culprit could be fined accordingly. Once this became public the council backtracked and stated that the sensors were there solely to easily resolve disputes over ownership of the bins!……. Oh Yea! At the same time the lorries have been fitted with automatic scales so that all the rubbish is weighed. If you were to exceed your permitted weight then again fined accordingly.
Now I think that we should be recycling even more than we do but councils should be making it easy to recycle not complex as with some councils at the moment. What is the problem with sorting centres as my own council has. Here the lorries collect all the rubbish unsorted and take it to the recycling plant where all the materials are automatically sorted. Very simple? Ah, but that way they cannot make any money out of us by fines.
So what we now have are sensors in our bins for the purpose of fining us, secret cameras photographing where we stop our cars, for the purpose of fining us even if you have a mechanical failure and have no choice but to stop. Soon we will have transmitters in our cars so that they can monitor our journeys and charge us for using the road. Why they do not go the whole way and chip us individually from birth so they can tax the air we breath …. Because we have to pay to breath clean air … the air is so polluted someone has to pay to clean it up and the easiest targets are us. Sex could also be monitored so that you could be taxed for exceeding your quota and charged additional sums for the disposal of the condoms. The ideas for ways of taxing us are limitless by using such sensors.
Our only hope for avoiding this scenario is that it would all be run by government computer systems and the government’s record on setting up functional IT systems is woeful. Either way we will still all end up paying more, either by way of being fined for this or that infringement or by having to pay for the IT failures.
However we may have all missed the real reason for putting sensors in our dustbins. Every initiative or punitive regulation these days is put down to one of two things; health and safety and/or fighting terrorism. Perhaps the real reason is to detect potential terrorists who might be hiding in our wheelie bins, in which case of course it is justified.
David owns and manages a cleaning services company
which operates throughout much of the UK. |
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