Barking mad
Rodney Hide and friends are apparently rebelling over their new parliamentary recycling bins and rubbish cubes:
ACT leader Rodney Hide said it was an example of the “nanny state gone barking mad”.
In an e-mail over-riding their protests, ACT staff were told to prepare for an hour-long “changeover”, an operation that was conducted with military precision on Monday.
In a show of defiance, some ACT staff have turned their recycling cubes into pen holders and are ignoring the instruction to sort their waste.
Green parliamentary staff and MPs have had this system in place for over a year and have been getting along fine - without any sign yet of nannies needing to tell us what to do. It’s not that hard Rodney. Your rubbish cube would not be overflowing if you took the piece of paper out of it and put it in the paper recycling bin.
Photo Credit: Dominion Post
June 11th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Could it be any more clear? Responsible people do what needs to be done un-asked. Irresponsible people refuse to do what needs to be done when asked.
This isn’t about any “Nanny State” It’s about ACT-minded folk refusing to be responsible with their waste for the good of everyone. If is a perfect illustration of the selfish, irresponsible outlook that underlies their ideology and the policies that arise from it.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:43 am
To be honest I kinda understand where Rodney is coming from. I too don’t like being told what to do if I have had no part in th process - even if deep down I know it is the right thing. I would suggest to him then that his office should be proactive, instead of reactive, and if he objects to the system being handed down from on high, he and his staffers come up with their own system that works just as well, if not better. Pimp-my-own-recycling-station styles.
Then he should get over himself. In the end reducing ecological footprint is a bigger issue than he is. Even with weight loss added in.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I’d suggest that the rubbish cubes are barking mad and unsustainable. They are too small to be useful for anything, taxpayer funded, and using up resources, essentially taxpayer funded rubbish.
Surely the money spent on the cubes could be better spent on recycling, than a cube that is too small to actually put material to recycle in?
June 11th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Just to clarify for MikeE, the small bin Rodney’s holding is the rubbish bin. It doesn’t need to be bigger if you’re recycling everything that can be. Act are even more pitiful than I thought.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:45 am
MikeE: Everything in Parliament is taxpayer funded…..including most of the rubbish ACT produce. Chanting “taxpayer funded” in this context isn’t meaningful…..
June 11th, 2008 at 11:45 am
JAPrufrock
>
>>I too don’t like being told what to do if I have had no part in th process - even if deep down I know it is the right thing.
I see you are one of those who like to ensure no progress is made unless EVERYONE has a veto, are you by any chance a pubic servant? This attitude is precisely the reason why nEW zeALAND is becoming a land of and for the mediocre - the ‘common denominator’ must always rule, and great ideas are put in the bin by NIHilists.
Shame on you, and shame on Rodney and co for not being prepared to try something new, and shame on those who ‘implemented’ the new system for not adequately communicating the reasoning behind it and its practical application.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
The article doesn’t really go into the reasons.
The bins look very small. Is that the issue? As for sorting kitchen waste, that can be time consuming over the long run (which costs taxpayer money), and has little real benefit.
Not that being wasteful is a good idea, just wondering if it’s more to do with the process itself.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Well, ACT do put out a lot of rubbish, so it isn’t hard to imagine their rubbish bins filling up before everyone else.
June 11th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
No, not the process, its the politics
June 11th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Strings.
You should keep to just presenting your argument, and resist making a total fool out of yourself by trying to profile someone from one comment they post on a blog.
>>I see you are one of those who like to ensure no progress is made unless EVERYONE has a veto, are you by any chance a pubic servant?
No. And no.
>>Shame on you for not being prepared to try something new
You have no idea how prepared I am to try new things.
You are so wrong. Shame on you for making such assumptions.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Rodney wins hands down on Close Up.
He came across as sensible practical and pragmatic.
What annoyed the c*^p out of me was seeing magazine wrapping, sushi wrapping, sandwich wrapping, etc etc being put in the mini-me rubbish box while everyone is talking about the vessel!
Greens please get with the game, every week once I have composted my compostables, combusted my combustables and recycled my recylables there is still all this plastic that I can’t recycle.
Work on that and people might respect your initiatives more than a pathetic cube.
Work on that and then the cube might not be needed at all.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Rodney won.
As I suspected, the mini bin is a truly pointless, symbolic exercise…
June 11th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Wins? More like an utterly infantile display from a spoiled child. Having used a similar system for awhile now, I can vouch that it is no problem at all. Poor little Rodney doesn’t like to have his cheese moved. Poor little Rodney has too many government bills to read and needs a BIG bin to throw them all away. My kids couldn’t believe he’s an MP! But this should certainly help voters decide to relieve him of his burden on election day.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
I loved the bit when Rodney went all the way over to the TV3 studios to complain about tiny little rubbish bins preventing MPs from concentrating on important things like murderers. That was great. I wonder if he’ll do another press release on those tiny little rubbish bins tomorrow.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
I though Metiria came across really well on close up. Was interesting contrast to Rodney who was looking a puritanical…
Most amusing!
Seriously Rodney. Get with the programme man.
As Metiria put it
Reduce, Reuse then Recycle - (Rubbish doesn’t come into it)
June 12th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
# Tuatara Says:
June 11th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
> As Metiria put it
> Reduce, Reuse then Recycle - (Rubbish doesn’t come into it)
Works with a lot of things, but in practice I find it difficult to reduce, re-use or recycle medical waste.
June 12th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Yeah, kahikitea, where do used syringes/needles actually go on disposal?
There must be some reuse/recycle options given adequate sterilisation. Or are there some bugs that sterilisation just can’t kill?
Can see that there are no options for re-use or recycling of blood or pus soaked dressings though! BTW, where do they end up?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Its a shame Metiria was wrong in putting the no7 food container (sandwich holder) in the residual waste. It gets gets taken for supposed recycling in China now.
Trouble is some of the 5-7 plastics from NZ recycling ends up in chinese waste to energy incineration plants as support fire, because its cheaper than coal and double the calorific value.
Toad -syringes/needles get furnaced. you cannot reuse them
June 13th, 2008 at 1:07 am
To balance out this tiny gesture in favour of the environment the government indirectly made it onto the cover of Truck & Driver this month. New Zealand’s most powerful road legal truck taken for a test drive…delivering the mail from Wellington to Auckland. 400,000 km a year. If the government won’t use the railways to deliver surface mail why did the government even bother buying the railways?
June 13th, 2008 at 11:26 am
# toad Says:
June 12th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
> Yeah, kahikitea, where do used syringes/needles actually go on disposal?
currently they burn them. There used to be sterilisable syringes before the current ones were invented. Maybe now someone could come up with a new improved sterilisable syringe to replace the disposable ones.
There must be some reuse/recycle options given adequate sterilisation. Or are there some bugs that sterilisation just can’t kill?
Can see that there are no options for re-use or recycling of blood or pus soaked dressings though! BTW, where do they end up?
In hospitals, they are collected in special bins and taken to a high-temperature incinerator which converts them into dioxins which it pumps into the air. If they are removed at home, they usually get put into the normal rubbish collection and get buried in landfills. There’s a parallel with the disposal of menstural sanitary pads - they have special bins with sterilising fluid for them in public toilets, but nobody bothers with a set-up like that at home. I really don’t know what precautions are necessary and what aren’t.
June 14th, 2008 at 12:37 am
“There used to be sterilisable syringes before the current ones were invented.”
The current ones were invented for paramedics and other mobile or remote medics. Their use in hospitals began when hospitals started to get managers who had never used sterilisers and who did not believe that sterilisers could work perfectly forever without ever being serviced or tested. So they instituted quality control systems and identified a minute failure rate for sterilisers and sterilisable syringes. Minute, not zero.
June 14th, 2008 at 11:28 am
The syringe is a tiny amount of high quality surgical steel with a gob of plastic attached. Used to be re-used but they actually get dull with time and extremely painful. The automation of manufacture has made it possible to make them all very sharp, much thinner and more convenient… to recycle however, leaves us with the question of what is stuck in that capillary sized steel tube…
With AIDS an issue nobody willingly re-uses a needle except diabetics and heroin addicts… and even then they prefer re-using them on themselves to someone elses.
Since the amounts of steel involved are small it doesn’t pay well to even try… melting them or heating them to white heat is sufficient but that costs somewhat in terms of power.
respectfully
BJ
June 14th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
As someone who has had to deal with literally millions of used syringes in third world situations, I feel qualified to say that there are significant health benefits to be gained from the use of disposables over re-usable syringes. These would apply just as validly to first world situations. The single biggest risk from all types of syringes is needle stick injuries caused most commonly when attempting to re-cap the needle after use. I don’t have to explain the health risk to professionals getting stuck by a needle that was just seconds ago inside someone known to be ill!
The fix - don’t re-cap your needles after use. A reusable needle then must be stored safely (in bulk) before sterilisation - a big logistical nightmare, which implies that we should go back to capping them after use. Vicious circle.
A disposable needle can by design usually allow the needle to be removed from the syringe without touching it, by pushing the needle into a v-cut in the collection bin and twisting it off of the syringe. The needle is now in the sharps container with very little plastic attached and the syringe can go into the medical waste bin for incineration.
By the way, the incineration, even in third world situations, can be easily be done without producing dioxins. Simple high efficiency oven designs can be built from readily available fire bricks. I’ve built dozens in clinics around the world. For those syringes where the needle will not separate, (by design), we simply burned them in the ovens on large cookie sheets, with only the sterile needles left afterwards which were then buried in concrete with the rest of the sharps. The metal component is so small as to not be worth recycling, even in a large facility. I suppose we could have saved up all our sterile sharps for recycling, but it would be a logistical nightmare for very little gain.
#1 risk - needle stick.