‘In Denmark in the 1970s they stuck it into education,’ said Iain. ‘They said, “We’ll invest in the young,” and out of that they developed high standards of environmental protection. And those people are now voting. Next thing we knew they want 10p on plastic bags. But we have not done environmental stewardship before now, that’s why people think the whole thing is tough and punitive. But it’s happening.’
The main point of the Community Recycling Network is to get away from the kind of shoddy recycling practice I saw at work in Harrow. ‘There’s too much contamination,’ Andy said, ‘as there would be because the methods are way too coarse and are propelled by the profit instincts of the waste companies. We are talking about much finer kinds of separation: not just paper in one bin, but different kinds of paper and no commingling of different materials.’
‘But the main thing,’ said Mal, ‘is you must put value on these things as a resource. And you’ve got to give the people a shove. You’ve got to give them the stuff to do it with.’
‘That’s us,’ said Andy. ‘Most of our people do kerbside collections, and we have composters, furniture collectors. Some of them are motivated by the environment and some are motivated by social concerns and for others it’s just something really, really personal.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, value systems. Empowering people in life. Your waste stream is really the most visible way that you impact on the world. You can see the stuff in the waste bin and you know what you’re generating. The thing that makes me angry is the way waste companies have been able to con local authorities – the con-ability of local authorities itself angers me. At the moment we’re trying to achieve a better system: not just minimising the waste stream but realising value from it. Do you see the difference? The government’s problem is that its attitude is too much “end of pipe”; it waits until the rubbish is there before it thinks of what it’s going to do with it. The real task is to design society so that you’re not stuck with rubbish.’
Into the night, the group talked about the transformation of personal values in Britain and the state-sponsored murder of old habits and stuffed bins. Unlike the Freegans, they didn’t look to God for guidance in the wasteland, but to Europe, where a great many communities already view past mindlessness with a sort of bafflement. The men at the table had mortgages and they believed in eco-business: they foresee a future in which the profit motive will transform rubbish into American dollars, which they assume is the only way the world will listen. In the end, it may be that the Freegans go the same way as the incinerators, made redundant by the smart redeploying instincts of big business, those forces that once kept each of them burning through the dark.
*
You know where it all ends. But how very slowly the sense of an ending is transmogrifying into a new beginning. I was reminded of the distance to go the first time I spoke to the public relations representative at the Edmonton incinerator, or, as they prefer, the London Waste EcoPark Recycling and Energy Centre. Edmonton is responding to some of the realities I’ve been trying to describe – they speak of treating rubbish as a resource – but still they feel tarred with the old brush. And it would be hard not to feel that way: the plant is burning household rubbish at an absolutely colossal rate and the world doesn’t like it. ‘I’m just having trouble working out what it is you would like to do,’ said Wendy Lord, head of corporate communications.
‘I want to see what you do at Edmonton.’
‘But we’re quite an old facility. I could arrange for you to visit one of the newer ones.’
‘I’d prefer to come to Edmonton,’ I said. ‘Just to see how you’re coping with some of the new demands.’
‘I don’t know, Andrew. Whatever.’
‘If you need to know more about me, that’s fine,’ I said.
‘And how would I do that, Andrew?’
I don’t know if they say so at public relations school, but extreme reluctance can be understood as a form of aggression. (As can over-deployment of one’s name.) It can also signal a feeling of paranoia or shame, but none of that was in evidence when eventually I met Wendy Lord. She came striding up to me in the reception area at Edmonton wearing knee-high boots and a frighteningly professional smile, part tolerance, part indulgence. I felt that Wendy might have trained herself to spot an eco-nutter at 500 yards, but she seemed to give me the benefit of the doubt and led me upstairs, where I was invited to sit and watch a video. The fact that she starred in the video did not contribute largely to my sense of ease, but in no time I was learning about London Waste’s flagship efforts to clean up and renew. The PR job was happening on an industrial scale, but that notwithstanding, many people believe incinerators are merely landfill sites in the sky. ‘The problem has not been with organic waste,’ Robin Murray writes, ‘but with materials which give off toxic emissions when burned.’ Early tracking ‘of dioxins and furans identified incinerators as the prime source and even in the mid-1990s, when other sources were uncovered, municipal incinerators still accounted for over a third of all estimated emissions’.
The Edmonton centre is owned equally by the North London Waste Authority and the private waste management company SITA UK. Far from admitting to being a blight, Edmonton sees itself as a model of regulation, boasting that ‘the official fireworks display on Millennium Night was equivalent to over a century of dioxin emissions from our plant’. In 1996, the plant invested £15 million in gas cleaning equipment that it claims has contributed towards the reduction of emissions to the point where they are ‘negligible’ and ‘insignificant’. When Wendy Lord came back to find me scribbling, she started to speak like something of an eco-warrior herself. ‘Nimbyism is rife in the UK,’ she said. ‘And we need more joined-up thinking. In Japan, they’ll think about waste management before they build the town. We follow a holistic approach, where electricity is produced from residual waste, and it all requires a new way of thinking. The organic waste produced by a town can be used to “green” that town.’
If we hadn’t been sitting to the side of a monstrous furnace that day, I would have sworn Wendy Lord was one of the new evangelists. ‘It’s about the three Rs,’ she said: ‘reduce waste, reuse as much as you can, and recover value from what’s left.’ She counted them out on her fingers. ‘It’s a choice you – Andrew – make,’ she added. ‘Be informed. Think. No one wants to talk about rubbish. It’s not sexy. We’re interested in shiny. You know, I have nothing in my attic but a Christmas tree. And the profile of waste management is now being raised.’
Or erased. It cannot have escaped Lord’s notice that the company she represents so effectively will be put out of business when Zero Waste becomes a reality. That is the irony that lies dormant inside the volcano: Edmonton talks eco-friendly – and is, indeed, as eco-friendly as an incinerator could be – but it remains a factory for the mass immolation of rubbish and that concept is antithetical to progressive thinking in the waste-management sphere. The logical outcome of Lord’s ideology is in fact the closure of her own firm, as human virtue would have rendered it obsolete, though there might always be a greatly downsized role for the plant in burning clinical waste. As she spoke of the electricity that is produced by the furnaces at Edmonton, it occurred to me that perhaps the future use of incinerators would be to burn other incinerators, keeping a few lights running to lead us out of the dark.
We walked through the building, stopping on a concrete platform like the bridge of a giant destroyer (In Which We Serve, with me as Noël Coward) to watch the procession of bin lorries that swept into the bays to drop off their rubbish. Outside, I could see two huge ash-heaps, the latest cinders of the twenty-four-hour fires, and beyond them the high flats of Enfield, and I wondered whether an examination of the breast-milk of the mothers who lived there might not settle a silent argument between Wendy and the world. But that’s not fair: Wendy was being reasonable and professional, and much of what she said expressed a truth about London Waste’s progress. The heat r
ose as we climbed the stairs. It rose with a notion of tension, and the scale of the fires below began to occupy my mind. The whole place seemed to thrum, as if we were standing on a great and natural instability, a fault line, a volcano, whose threatening energy was powering an industrial process.
At this point we entered an immense hangar that looked like a missile silo out of James Bond; it looked Soviet and outmoded, it looked built for massive destruction, capable of unleashing violence and deadly force on an old-fashioned scale. The air smelled sulphurous and I looked down into a number of unspeakably deep concrete canyons, with grabbing equipment hanging above them and the litter of our lives heaped at the bottom. The grabbers were truly huge; each one looked as if it could easily lift a house and a family and all their desires and all their trash too and drop the lot into the flames. ‘The rubbish comes down to nothing with burning,’ said Wendy. ‘It’s magical.’ The grabber puts fifteen tons of refuse an hour into the boilers. The colossus seemed hungry for black bags and boxes. It roared and I almost toppled into the yawning canyon when thinking of the countless miles of rubbish that had passed through there since 1969. All burned. Living somewhere still. Gone but not gone. A single plastic bag fell from the edge of the canyon, and glided down, all the way down. It felt very primitive, with the smell of burning trash and the grind of titanic engines a suddenly vertigo-inducing denouement to the mad logic of commodification.
We went behind the boilers and looked at the complicated system by which the rubbish is burned, and the even more complicated system by which the resulting gases are cleaned and made to produce electricity. It would be too boring to describe, but it works. I stood behind the bank of screens in the control room and watched through thick glass as the fires were filmed by a camera. The fire is 850°C. A large screen shows the chemical make-up of the burning rubbish – substances can be added to the boiler to counterbalance some of the toxins. The electricity creation is all basic physics, but as the control room manager explained it to me my face took on the look it used to have when I was doing physics at school, and I imagined there were bigger things going on in the world. I was still dizzy from the death-in-life experience of the canyons next door, and feeling too that I had visited a scene that one day will have joined the blacking factory in our memories. ‘Local people just think the dustcart throws the rubbish in and it’s burned,’ said one of the workers in the control room. ‘But it’s much more complicated than that. People see the chimney and they panic.’
I turned on the kitchen light at home and examined the rubbish lying on the newspapers. Perhaps Bataille is right and a loss of disposability will mean a loss of sovereignty, but it didn’t feel like it as I picked through the things and remembered the fire. The bulb in the light overhead might have an afterlife and so might the fridge that hummed in the quiet of the small hours. The tiles under my feet might stock the foundation of a new road one day; the kettle and the clock would never die. After putting the stuff back inside the bag and closing the lid I went online to see about organ and tissue donation.
* According to BBC news reports, some boroughs are now set to employ ‘recycling police’, whose job will be to capture and fine people who contaminate bins or fly-tip.
Brothers
FEBRUARY 2008
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
WALT WHITMAN, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’
Every time you blink there are ten flashes of lightning in the earth’s atmosphere. If you were to look down from a vantage point at the edge of near space, you would see constant flashes from deep inside the earth’s cloud cover – red, white, red, white, blue – a fugue of lights that might seem to warn of emergencies down below. Had you been looking on 2 May 2005 you might also have seen phenomena that were new to the planet’s history. In the Atlantic Ocean, icebergs larger than Manhattan were floating away from the coast of Antarctica. A hurricane season was brewing that would break all records: Hurricanes Cindy, Dennis and Emily were gathering their elements, preceding Hurricane Katrina, which would hit America’s Gulf Coast and become the costliest disaster in that country’s history. But on 2 May the trouble was merely stirring while US aircraft carriers travelled east through the curiously cold waters of the Atlantic.
In southern Iraq, just south of Al-Amarah, the main city of Maysan province, the British military base at Camp Abu Naji was preparing for the night. Set at the northern end of the marshlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the camp is now abandoned and looted, but in May 2005 it was a busy centre of military operations. Al-Amarah has seen many reversals of fortune and opinion: it was once a hideout for anti-Saddam insurgents, whom he punished by draining the marshes. He also killed many of them, and buried their bodies in mass graves around the city. But by the time the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards were operating out of Camp Abu Naji, it was the British army that had become the enemy of the people. Mortar attacks on the base were just part of the general grief, a handful of dust to be thrown regularly in the face of the occupying forces.
Anthony Wakefield, aged twenty-four, had a long memory of night-time patrols. He had done any number of them in Northern Ireland. On the evening of 1 May 2005 he was talking about his children and making jokes while assembling his kit to attend a briefing from the company commander, Major Coughlin. The plan that night was to leave Camp Abu Naji and travel in a north-westerly direction, seeking to prevent the enemy’s retreat from an area under Coalition control. Guardsman Wakefield was told to provide top cover in the second of two ‘snatches’ – a V8 Land Rover, lightly armoured – which would travel the road out of Al Amarah in the dark. Sergeant Ian Blackett was in the patrol’s first vehicle and had known Wakefield for five months. There were fourteen men in the patrol and Wakefield was one of the most experienced. ‘He was a professional soldier,’ says Blackett. Some soldiers don’t seem to do much except cheer up other soldiers, yet they surprise everyone with their readiness. ‘A good lad, who was definitely up to it.’
Guardsman Gregory Shaw says they left camp at 10 p.m. Wakefield’s head and shoulders were protruding from the top of the second snatch, the usual position for a soldier doing top cover. ‘Everybody was fatigued,’ says Shaw. ‘You know it’s going to be a long hot night. A lot of people are shy of work and want to do as little as possible, but he [Wakefield] was always one to muck in.’ The patrol could hear bursts of small-arms fire as they made their way along the road. Over the course of the next hour or so they met other patrol groups from the company. ‘We then did a U-turn on Green 9 and Green 12 [combat zones] and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the Al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not sure if we drove to Green 5 – the streets were getting quieter.’ The patrol was about forty kilometres from Camp Abu Naji and the vehicles trundled over a dimly lit road. ‘It was a sort of urban area but with a lot of waste ground,’ says Blackett. ‘A few buildings on the road, a few shops, and very dark. Very few people. It was one of the roads leading out of town.’
‘He was happy. He seemed cheerful,’ says Guardsman Gary Alderson, who was next to Wakefield in the snatch. ‘Seemed happy all the way round. I was facing rearwards, he was facing forwards.’ Two hundred metres short of the zone called Green 6 there was a loud explosion and what some of the soldiers describe as a fireball at the right side of the second vehicle. ‘Wakefield fell inside the snatch,’ says Alderson. ‘I went down inside as well. I was very disorientated and can’t remember much.’ Lance Sergeant Phipps’s immediate impulse was to get the patrol out of ‘the killing zone’. He instructed the driver to power ahead, but the vehicle
was damaged and broke down after fifty metres. ‘I could see Wakefield lying across Lance Sergeant Newton’s lap,’ says Phipps. ‘Guardsman Alderson was injured. Wakefield had a pulse but was not breathing.’ The stranded occupants just stared into the blackness at the retreating lights of the snatch in front.
In the first vehicle, Blackett saw a flash and sparks at 23:37 hrs, and told the driver to put his foot down and get out of there. Then he realised the second snatch wasn’t following them and went back to help. They radioed headquarters as their snatch rumbled back to the stricken vehicle.
The regimental medical officer at Camp Abu Naji, Captain Vickers, was woken before midnight and told to come to the operations room. ‘A contact had been made and we had a casualty’. The blast had come from an explosive device hidden at the side of the road, concealed in a mound of dirt with an infra-red trip set in front of the charge. The device installed in every vehicle, intended to detect and short-circuit such devices, had in this instance failed.
Guardsman Wakefield was wearing standard body armour at the time of the blast, which provides protection to the front and back of the torso. Projectiles entered his neck and upper chest, the latter through the unprotected side area of his vest. A forensic pathologist later said the neck injury severed one of four main arteries to the brain. The material passing through his chest hit a lung and the heart, causing massive internal bleeding. He had no chance of survival. Captain Andrew Cox dispatched a helicopter to pick up the injured man and bring him back to base. The helicopter carried him to camp Abu Naji where he was ventilated, but his pupils became fixed and at 0050 hrs on 2 May 2005, surrounded by medical officers, Guardsman Wakefield was declared dead.
The Atlantic Ocean Page 35
