Stinking rich in Holland Park

When you’re wearing rubber gloves, a streaming nose is no joke. To begin with, I wipe it on the sleeve of my new reflective jacket. But after ten minutes of hauling dustbins, I’ve covered the sleeve in muck; so I reach inside for my sweatshirt – bearing the logo of Sita, the company which collects rubbish in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – and wipe my nose on that.

The job of dustman is not fun, and nor is it improved by rain. From every bin-bag, water pours down my leg and into my steel-toe-capped boots. Meanwhile the rain continues to fall, dribbling down my neck and inside my jacket. After half an hour, even my underpants are soaked.

On Royal Crescent, a wet dustbin slips from my shoulder. There’s only one way to steady it: with my head. So that’s what I use. After emptying the bin into the noisy dustcart, I wipe a sleeve against my ear to remove a dark smear of goo. Coffee grounds? I hope so.

In the royal borough, every household gets two collections a week. (The householder’s cost, covered by council tax, is less than £14 a year.) The streets I’m doing today, spread between Holland Park Avenue and the Westway, boast some of the most prosperous homes in the country, and my guess is that they produce are no less rubbish than the national average – a tonne a year, for a family household.

I’m working with the crew of K2, one of 17 dustcarts covering Kensington. Cliff, the team leader, has thinning hair and a heavily lined face. Steve has bulging eyes and wears a beanie hat marked “England”. The third loader, Tim, is younger and inexplicably cheerful. Then there’s the driver, Mick, whose short bursts behind the wheel do not exempt him from the arduous business of throwing rubbish into the grinding jaws of his machine.

We left the depot at 6.20am. Theoretically, our shift ends at 4pm. But dustmen are not paid well – even team leaders earn just £15,000 – so to finish as quickly as possible we forego breaks and gather rubbish like men possessed. Steve, for instance, generally carries eight bags at once.

Kensington and Chelsea has invested heavily in its fleet. K2, which cost £150,000, has two compartments at the back: a large one for ordinary rubbish and a smaller one for recyclable paper, glass and plastic. For many residents, this provides an excellent opportunity to Do The Right Thing – residents such as Richard Branson, whose bins, Cliff claims, were emptied until last year by the crew of K2. Branson has a history of participating in rubbish initiatives. In 1986 he was invited by Margaret Thatcher to spearhead UK2000, a “clean-up Britain” campaign, and this he did until 1990 – Tidy Britain Year – when, odd though it may seem, the campaign was wound up. Branson, I’m willing to bet, is precisely the sort of considerate homeowner who would separate recyclables from ordinary rubbish.

The vast majority don’t bother. Some don’t even use bin bags – they just throw everything loose in the bin – so Cliff, Steve and Tim must carry heavy loads up slippery basement stairs then back down again (with bags, just one trip is necessary). Other people do use bags, but without bothering to tie them, so the contents fall out.

In a basement on Lansdowne Crescent, a flimsy white bag spills its contents all over my feet. Cursing silently, I put down the other bags I’m carrying and gather up the unappealing leftovers: pasta coils, eggshells, soft tomatoes, a scattering of sweetcorn and upturned boxes oozing creamy sauce.

That’s not even the worst thing you find in bin-bags. Squinting through the rain, Cliff holds up a piece of glass. “The ****s that put loose glass in the bin: they’re the worst.” Not long ago, a loose shard sliced through the muscle behind his knee, and Cliff had to be taken to hospital.

There are other hazards too. On Holland Park Avenue, Cliff points to a house and says: “Leave that one – there’s rats.”

A few houses along, somebody has put out 30 beer bottles in a cardboard box. Soaked by the rain, the box collapses when I pick it up, so we carry off slippery bottles by the fistful. Inevitably, two or three slip, scattering brown glass across the pavement.

But the funny thing is, nobody seems to notice. People look right through us, as if dustmen were invisible. The hurtful truth, I find, is that the public does not esteem dustmen. Which is odd, because the British are tremendously productive of rubbish. This month marks the 10th anniversary of Tidy Britain Group, but despite a decade of cajoling, we remain – as the environment minister, Michael Meacher, has memorably put it – a “messy, sloppy nation”. With a few far-seeing exceptions – Meacher, Branson, the Wombles – we’re unthinking chuckers-away, infinitely messier than the French or the Germans, let alone the Swiss. And without dustmen we’d be in big trouble.

At 1.30pm, our shift comes to an end. Ceremonially, we throw our gloves into the rubbish in the back. Then we drive to a transfer station in Wandsworth, beside the Thames, where we pause on a weighbridge behind a cart from the neighbouring borough, Hammersmith and Fulham, then reverse towards a vast hatch and evacuate our load. On the way out, the cart is weighed again, and an illuminated screen gives us an adjusted figure. Cliff does his sums. Over seven hours, we’ve collected 10.8 tonnes of general rubbish and 2.4 tonnes of recycling. “Not bad,” he says, “for a Monday.”

In waste management, demand is entirely driven by legislation – without laws, we’d probably still throw rubbish from our windows – and every new law makes the industry bigger. Right now, with the annual quantity of rubbish amounting to 130m tonnes – at current rates of growth there’ll be twice as much by 2020 – the business is worth £3.5bn. No single company has more than eight per cent of the market, but there’s been a decisive shift, over the last decade or so, from owner-entrepreneurs to PLCs: that trend was highlighted, in 1997, when a former mining engineer called Terry Adams sold his landfill business to South West Water for £105m.

Ten companies account for two-thirds of the waste industry, and when you examine their ownership structures, you discover an interesting fact. The market leaders, Onyx and Sita, are both French-owned. Zut , one imagines them thinking, if we clean up after those Brits, we’ll, er, clean up.

Of course, it’s not just about collecting rubbish. Most companies are also involved in what happens next. There are three options. Some is recycled (we’ll get to that later). A fair bit is burned, to produce energy: a plant in the Midlands takes municipal waste and converts it to power for the car factory next-door. But incineration, though admirable, is not enough. What do you do with all the ashes?

The vast majority of rubbish is used as landfill. Nine London boroughs use the transfer station in Wandsworth to send waste by river, saving as many as 100,000 HGV movements which would otherwise clutter our roads. The company which operates this station, and the tug boats and barges, is Cory Environmental. In 1998-99, Cory shipped 602,599 tonnes to the landfill site it runs in a place called – would you believe it – Mucking, in Essex. As the next stage in my odyssey of filth, I catch a ride on one of Cory’s tugs.

In the past, before rubbish was containerised, it lay in open barges, loosely covered in tarpaulin. The man at the wheel this morning, Malcolm, remembers decks crawling with maggots – and MPs retreating indoors to escape the stench as barges passed by parliament. “Nowadays,” he shouts, as 1,400 horsepower engines boil up the river beneath us, “we don’t hardly know what we’re carrying.”

All the same, as we draw alongside the seat of government, and – soon after – the London Eye, the City and the Dome, I become dreadfully self-conscious. We may no longer stink, but we’re hardly silent, and we certainly spoil the view. But perhaps this is a good thing, because just as passers-by screen dustmen from their consciousness, so, ordinarily, we’re unaware of the fate – and sheer quantity – of the stuff we chuck in our bins. Just possibly, the sight and sound of these barges might help to address that indifference.

And what happens next? Where does rubbish meet its doom? To find out, I take a trip to a converted quarry outside Ipswich. Consisting of 10m cubic metres of void space, Masons landfill currently accepts 300,000 tonnes a year. At this rate, the facility – owned by Viridor – should last another 20 years.

The site is divided into cells – of about 200m square – just as a farm is divided into fields, explains Bruce Mackie, the manager. Each cell, lined with plastic like some vast garden pond, costs around £1m to engineer. “You build a cell,” Mackie explains, “and when that’s three-quarters full you start the next one.”

To show what he means, Mackie takes me for a spin in his jeep. We park beside a sign marked “Cliff Edge, Stay Away”. On one side, there’s a 40m drop. On the other, the last of the day’s dustcarts drive over a similar depth of compacted rubbish to evacuate their loads.

Ordinarily, a low-slung dustcart would not be considered ideal for this kind of off-road activity. But Mackie’s rubbish is not loose. He uses compactors – monstruous juggernauts on spiked wheels, worth £750,000 each – to press three times as much rubbish into the void as would be possible without them. “We pack it tightly,” he explains, “because we get more money that way. When you get yourself a hole, you want it to last.” And driving on top of tightly packed rubbish – even at a depth of 40m – does not pose a great problem for the 150-or-so dustcarts which arrive each day.

“I love rubbish,” Mackie announces, suddenly rhapsodic. “It always changes. It never ceases to amaze me what people throw away. Some people will throw away a CD player because the fuse has gone… Once, we had 20 tons of Polo mints – that made the place smell nice for a few days.” Another time, he received a consignment of liquor, confiscated at Felixstowe. More recently, there was some ham: “Fifteen tons of tinned ham. Nothing wrong with it, but it was shipped too late. The customer – a supermarket – insisted on six months’ shelf life. It arrived too late. They didn’t want it.”

When the heap approaches the point we’re standing on, it’s capped with a further layer of plastic. “It’s like a pie. The plastic is the pastry, and the rubbish is the meat.” On top of that comes 2m of earth, which allows the area to be used for pasture. Also built into this pie is an elaborate system of pipes. Some pump methane, which is burned to produce electricity – enough, from this site alone, to power a city the size of Exeter. The others suck up leachate, a murky distillation of landfill juice that collects inside each pie like noxious gravy. “Savage stuff. It’s black, with floating solids in it. Imagine what you’d get if you dissolved a can of catfood in warm water. Imagine the nappies, batteries and leftover aspirin,” he adds with evident relish. “It stinks, like nothing you’ve ever known. Only a very few people get to smell it. When they do…” – to illustrate this fearsome eventuality, Mackie waves his arms wildly, then pretends to stuff a hanky in his mouth.

Understandably, people do not clamour for landfill sites near their home. “People say it has a horrible smell, but I say it’s the smell of money.”

Mackie – wouldn’t you know it – believes his site has proved itself a good neighbour. “The regulations are second to none. Landfill sites can be shut down almost immediately. And that happens. The inspectors might come and say there’s too much dust, or noise, or smell – or too many gulls.” For each of these problems, Mackie has a solution. Dust is eliminated by sprinkling water over the entire site. Gulls are kept away by falconer. To discourage other scavengers, fresh waste is covered up each night with earth – which is also heaped up to deflect noise. Around the perimeter fence, Viridor has planted oak, hawthorn, alder, birch and willow to conceal the site from houses below. And in a far corner, Mackie has installed what look like five-a-side football goals. A sports facility for local youth? No, they’re not goals after all – they’re nets for catching rubbish blown by the prevailing wind. “People live 300 yards from the site,” Mackie declares, “but if you mention the landfill, most of them say, ‘What landfill?’”

We climb back into the jeep and drive to an adjacent field, studded with standpipes. Reaching down to one of these, Mackie turns a valve and I’m astonished by the force of the gas whooshing out. “You could power a town the size of Exeter with the amount we produce.”

There’s more than just landfill to Mackie’s operation. He also runs a recycling plant, producing about 30,000 tonnes of recycled material each year. Today, the workers are sorting plastic sheets. In a cabin at the top of some stairs, three men flourishing knives pull coloured material off a conveyor belt, leaving only the clear stuff. The coloured material – mostly blue, but some of it black – is dropped through a hole in the floor, to be gathered by a fork-lift truck and packed into bales. Further down the line, the clear plastic is sorted into different sizes, and then impurities – rubber bands, scraps of paper – are picked out. But here and there the plastic is covered in stickers, and it’s simply not economical for Mackie’s staff to remove those. Packed into bales, the plastic sheets are destined for China, where extremely reasonable labour costs turn them into grade one material through the removal of these stickers by bored individuals armed with scissors.

In many European countries, exporting this last part of the job would be unnecessary. That’s because continental countries have placed a heavy tax on landfill, effectively subsidising recycling operations. The British tax on landfill, by contrast, is low – and has anyway been absorbed, in large part, by falling landfill prices. And as the cost of landfill drops, the business case for recycling becomes less persuasive.

In 1990, the Conservative government announced a target. Within ten years, decreed the environment minister, Chris Patten, 25 per cent of household rubbish will be recycled. And why not? In Germany, where householders separate paper, glass, compost, plastics, batteries and the rest – 30 per cent is recycled. In Switzerland the proportion reaches as high as 50 per cent.

But here we are in 2000, and less than 10 per cent of household waste is recycled. Already, however, there’s a surplus of green glass for recycling. Nobody wants the end-product: roadbuilders sometimes use glass beneath the tarmac – but there aren’t enough roads being built to take it all. If we ever did reach the government’s target – postponed to 2005, but rising to 30 per cent by 2010 – there’d be enough surplus glass to… well, you tell me. Similarly, the price of recycled paper has dropped dramatically; and the more we recycle, the faster the price falls.

At the Environmental Services Association – like leachate, biosolids and practically everything else in this business, the waste industry’s trade association has a name which conceals more than it reveals – the chief executive, Dirk Hazell, strikes a note of caution. “You have to be careful not to regard recycling as always the best thing to do. People think recycling does not cost anything. But there is a cost. For example, the cost of putting lorries on the road: it’s not very good environmental practice to drive 35 miles to recycle a glass bottle.”

Outside his recycling unit – where some quixotic individual has planted flowerbeds – Mackie leads me to a rainbow spectrum of baled recyclables. To the left, grey paper. Next, coloured plastic – known in the trade as “jazz” – consisting largely of bottles of fabric conditioner, Harpic and Sunny Delight. Beyond that, whiteish plastic bales which sometimes explode when traces of milk inside them produce gas. Finally, on the far right, we come to mixed metals. “This is the one that stinks in the summer,” says Mackie, fondly tearing a label from a can of dogfood. “A real fly’s disco.”

From here, the cans are sent away to be separated into steel, aluminium and tin at a specialist plant; one of just a few dotted across the country. Among others, there’s a plant in Dorset where different types of plastic on a conveyor belt are scanned by a machine and blown into the appropriate container by air-jet. Outside Manchester, there’s a unit that recycles fluorescent lighting and sodium lamps – separating glass, metals and highly poisonous mercury – supplied by clients such as Andersen Consulting, the Co-Operative Bank and Leeds General Hospital.

These specialist facilities are not cheap to build. To pay their way, they must attract rubbish from near and far – including, possibly, abroad. “But if you say to politicians, ‘we have the technology, we want to import waste’,” says Hazel, “they say you can’t do that. It’s a political decision.”

This is the nub of the problem: Sentiment versus Money. We approve of recycling in principal, but don’t want to spend extra on it, and we don’t want foreign stuff. The government pays lipservice to the concept – issues ambitious targets – and local authorities lay on special collections. But market forces aren’t impressed. Market forces think recycling is a load of rubbish.

Meanwhile, the space available for landfill gets ever smaller. In Scotland, according to one recent estimate, all 275 sites currently available will be full within ten years. And the recent Budget has put in place an aggregates tax which will, if anything, reduce further the supply of holes in the ground.

What should be done? A national strategy for waste, due this month but postponed till May, will set out the government’s proposals. Quite possibly, the strategy will include Michael Meacher’s recent suggestion that “powerfully built” individuals should be appointed to act as litter wardens. But greater emphasis – to judge by the draft strategy – will be placed on reducing the quantities of rubbish we generate.

This will not be easy, because manufacturers like packaging. “Next time you get a chance,” says Bruce Mackie, “take a look at a box of Mr Kipling’s jam tarts. There’s the most enormous amount of packaging. Why do they do that? Because that’s what customers want? Because of food regulations? No, it’s to stand out on the shelves.”

A bottle of fabric conditioner, Mackie says, will last a thousand years. “Why can’t you take that back to the supermarket to refill it? You could walk into a supermarket with almost as much as you take away. And you would, if you were penalised for throwing things away.”

The only way to reduce waste, he says, is to charge for collections according by weight. “If your bin had a barcode on it, and it was weighed on the dustcart, you’d get an accurate bill. Then you’d turn round to Sainsbury or Tesco and say ‘I don’t want all this packaging’.”

I’m not convinced. Most people, I suspect, would dump rubbish in their neighbours’ bins, just as they currently dump the big stuff in somebody else’s skip. But I’m touched, all the same, that Mackie should bother to devise this waste reduction strategy. After all, this is a man whose livelihood depends on an endless supply of rubbish.

PLUS

A man with an insatiable urge to steal dustcarts was jailed for four months last year. Nicholas Attwell stole a Hales Wasteater from Willersey, in Gloucestershire, and while on bail for that offence stole a Cleanaway vehicle from Leominster.

At Cheltenham magistrates court he spoke only twice – once to confirm his name and the second time to admonish the bench for describing the Cleanaway vehicle as a Ford when it was actually a Mercedes.

PLUS

There are two principal types of waste: “active” (largely domestic rubbish, which decomposes to produce valuable methane) and “inert” (mostly builders rubble). To avoid landfill charges, inert waste is commonly dumped on golf courses and farms. For those who are caught, the fine is just £1,000 – not exactly prohibitive.

The Environmental Agency is planning to prosecute 240 hauliers after it discovered that hospital and household waste had been dumped on one farm to a height of 40 feet.

PLUS

The financial and environmental cost of running RCVs is enormous, as Lincolnshire council proved last year. By modifying its fleet to use clean fuels, the council saved £50,000 in a year.

Onyx, in Teignmouth, attempted to squeeze savings from its rounds by fitting carts to a £60,000 global positioning system and monitoring their movements by satellite.

3517 words. First published 29 April 00. © FT Magazine