It's all your fault...

I watched another one of those environmental sad stories on the TV new last night and quite often they boil my piss.

This one was about the increasing number and enormity of fatbergs in our drainage systems. They come from you pouring your unwanted fat and cooking oil down the drain. Some guy was offering handy hints, like keep a jam jar and pour it into that.

The feature mentioned that this has become a problem over the past ten years or so and the slant of the story was what are YOU going to do about it.

Regular soapbox readers will know that I used to work for an environmental company, who were no strangers to blocked drains amongst other things.

One of the services the company offered was interceptor cleaning and I'm not talking about the sleek cars they used to build in West Bromwich.

An interceptor or grease trap as they are also called does just that. They prevent grease from entering the drainage network (they also do the same with oil and petrol on garage forecourts).

A lot of responsible restaurant operators do have these installed and have them serviced to keep them operating correctly and lots don't

It's a matter of scale, a comparison as to how much fat an average household might end up sending down the plug hole and that of an irresponsible restaurant or fast food outlet and let's face it, fast food outlets are something of an epidemic on all fronts these days, yet unbalanced reporting puts the onus on we ornery folk, to stop tipping the stuff down the drains.

Indeed, individuals who just think the stuff just magically gets dealt with rather like those who litter the streets or worse fly tip. Education works to an extent, but the pitch ins one ended.

SIngle use plastics. Plastic carrier bags, plastic bottles, pop and milk for example, very popular commodities.

Glass, used to work quite well both as a container and reusable resource, we used to take pop bottles back to the shop and get a few pence deposit back ( I used to love this as a child) and we used to take milk bottles back and get fuck all, just because that's what you did. Milk and pop companies didn't seem to have a problem taking these containers back to base and following a cleansing operation, reusing them.

So who made the decision to switch to plastic ? The producers of the stuff people were consuming, NOT the consumer, yet it's now the consumer picking up the tab, 10p for the plastic carrier bags as a starter.

The politician's answer? TAX IT, their answer to everything, never thought out.

The sugar tax being one perfect example of a money raising white elephant where still, there is no evidence that the fat kids are any thinner, but one thing's for certain, the government bank balance is a lot fatter and who paid? YOU.

In quality control, when things go wrong, you engage in an activity called root cause analysis and the clue is in the title. Root cause. You begin and the root of your problem and analyse what action is necessary to prevent putting out a substandard end use, which your customers won't like, be it a product or service.

Note, you start at the root not the customer end of the problem.

I applaud David Attenborough for banging the drum and opening our eyes to the plastic shit floating around in the oceans and fucking up the wildlife. Personally, I do think it's too late and all the environmental outcry is mere backpedalling, as in we told you so.

On that note, I remember at junior school aged around eight, a teacher talking about the bronze age, the iron age and she said we will be known as the plastic age, because it doesn't rot. That was over fifty years ago, when pop and milk still came in glass containers and carrier bags were made from paper.

In short, politicians should either fuck off or come up with suggestions other than taxing something they see as bad or, shut the fuck up Manufacturers are the ones who should be pushing their R&D departments into considering the environmental impact on their convenience packaging.

Consumers can only consume what's sold to them, what they do afterwards, is very much down to the individual, but I do wish the likes of Nick knowles and Gregg Wallace would stop making TV programmes where the consumer is the responsible fucking party.