Recently, I took a trip down to our local Waste Tip to get rid of my recently accumulated recycling waste. I try to recycle everything that I possibly can, partly because of all the publicity to do with recycling that we get these days, but primarily because I've always hated wasting anything.
Today, of course, we live in a 'throw-away' society, where perfectly good items get taken to the tip simply because they're considered out-of-date, which usually means that they've been superseded by the latest model. In this digital, computerised Age, even the newest of items is quickly considered to be out-of-date, with newer models being issued at rapid intervals. All of this is really just clever marketing, a means of encouraging people to believe that the thing which was the ultimate in latest chic yesterday is fit only for the scrap-heap today, having been replaced with an even newer, faster/brighter/quieter/whatever, model virtually overnight.
Of course, there are still many folk who squirrel away things that remind them of younger times in their lives, and so a great many collections of vinyl records --- and even of the old 78's --- exist. I have still got the very first LP which I bought when I was a lad of about 15 years old. It's a Slim Whitman LP, and I get as much pleasure from listening to it today as I did when I first purchased it, even though I don't get the opportunity to play it very often nowadays.
Another thing that I readily admit to is that, like many men who have done a lot of DIY over the years, including, in my own case, rebuilding a house, I collect nails
and screws and other useful (or in the eyes of some people, 'useless), items such as escutcheons and hinges, all of which I am certain that I'll find a use for 'one day'. Now, as those of you who hoard these sort of items like me will know, the 'one-day' never seems to materialise very often, the result being that your hoard gets bigger and bigger until, in a fit of spring-cleaning the shed or cupboard where you store the endless jars of carefully collected items such as the nails that you spent ages straightening out, you finally commit them to the tip.As you enter the nearby town of Widnes, there is a vast moutain of rusting metal scrap. I guess that if you don't have a clean out in your sheds every now and then, this is what you can end up with! It's about twice the height of the average house!
Take a visit to your local tip and you'll be amazed at what you can see. There are piles of electrical goods that the Charity Shops no longer take, even though they are in perfectly good order, because they have to have them checked out and certified OK by an electrician, which usually costs a couple of pounds. Hence, a perfectly good item which could be sold for about ten pounds is turned away for the sake of spending a few measly pounds to certify it. Mind you, this regulation is of ten taken to the extreme. Last year I took four sets of spotlight tracks to a local Charity Shop, still pristine new in their unopened and factory-sealed boxes, only to be met initially with a refusal because they needed, so I was told, to be checked by an electrician! I explained that they were BRAND NEW, and that the reason I was disposing of them was because I had purchased them for a project that eventually never came to fruition. Incredulously, I was still met with a refusal. I told the Lady Jobsworth that if she wouldn't take them I would jump up and down on them until they were fit only for scrap-metal, rather than take them to the tip so that the 'man-who-collects-things-to-sell-on-the-market' could grab them! These lighting units had been purchased by me originally at a discounted cost of £29.75 each.
