Occams Razor and Household Waste

Illegal dumping of waste is replacing drugs as organized crime money maker...
More evidence of the stupidity of modern government.
J. Delingpole of the Daily Mail

Link Here

My comments...

The principle of Occam's Razor is: “Of several acceptable explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest is preferable, provided that it takes all circumstances into account.”

So what would be the application of this theory to garbage pickup and disposal?

The simplest way to deal with garbage in a city is for everyone to simply put out his or her garbage in a bag (or bags) and someone comes along and picks it up. No muss no fuss.

Our current approach to garbage pickup includes centralizing it as much as possible in one entity with municipal employees making substantially more money and getting considerably sweeter

fringe benefits than equivalent employees in the private sector enjoy. It requires residents to carefully sort their garbage into various piles and store it for a week. It is picked up and put on a

truck, taken off the truck and put on a much bigger truck which then drives it about 100 miles, dumps it and then turns around and drives back a hundred miles empty. Certain types of trash:

paper, plastic and organic waste (mixed with nonorganic waste) are treated differently; theoretically it would be sold to be reused.

Problem is that most - almost all -  of these sorted waste products have no buyers or are contaminated so they are stored in warehouses.

Much of the world has taken advantage of new technologies by making a gas from the rubbish or burning it to create additional energy from waste.

This utopian solution works almost everywhere, but not in Canada.

Why? Because this would somehow violate our shepherding of the planet and eliminate a large number of government jobs. This without taking into account the environmental costs of treating

garbage like a VIP limo patron and driving it a hundred miles and then burying it which then results in previously appointed farm land spewing methane.

Is there a prospect that the simplest, least expensive and most environmentally sound method of disposing of our detritus will ever be seen in Toronto?

With the gang now running city hall not any more chance than a householder not having at least one maggot attack during the course of a warm summer.

In a postmodern world garbage removal is like everything else that government does these days: form wins out over function.