You’ve got to love America! It’s such an endless source of bizarre social oddities. Don’t get me wrong, I mean some of my best friends are American (they’re not, actually, but if they were American I’d like them just the same so that proves I’ve got nothing against Americans, doesn’t it?). From the country that has apparently taken time to create specific laws against “chaining an alligator to a fire hydrant”, “operating a vehicle whilst blindfolded” and “eating an orange in your bath tub” came my greatest amusement of the month.
A law which came into force at the beginning of 2008, means it is now illegal to take any refuse (aka trash) out of Franklin County, New York!
People living in Saranac Lake (not literally - it’s a place name, of course) are split by the county line which divides the area up between Franklin County and Essex county. Most people on the Franklin County side apparently take their rubbish to the waste transfer station on the Essex County side, as it is much nearer. However, this now makes them, technically, a bunch of trash-running outlaws!
It’s all about dollars, of course. In a system where tonnage equals revenue, counties now seem desperate to keep hold of all their waste rather than being happy to see it leave (a bit like a kid who doesn’t want to make the move from nappies to toilets).
The County Legislator is reported as saying “There are people in the county who are taking Franklin County garbage out to Essex. This is a problem for the county, because the county relies on fees from garbage disposal to fund waste management.”
Now, I could be missing something here, but I’d have thought the cost of funding waste management was directly proportionate to the amount of waste in need of managing? This argument sounds vaguely familiar - in the eighties, when littering was considered to be almost as cool and rebellious as smoking, I used to have a go at mates who nonchalantly dropped pasty wrappers in the street to impress girls, but they’d just say “Shut up, you hippy, I’m creating jobs for street cleaners.”
The loss of revenue from fees for the waste being taken out of Franklin County is apparently a staggering $680,000! Franklin County residents reportedly pay around $85 a ton in ‘tipping fees’ compared to the more usual $45-60 in the state. Hmmm... no wonder they don’t want to see their trash cash slipping away.
The worrying thing is, while the rest of the world is working together to reduce our waste output, it seems some American authorities are fighting to keep hold of it! You get the impression that if the people of Franklin County got much more innovative in reducing and re-using their waste, the place could go bankrupt!
Anyway, enough about strange laws. This month’s amusing skip picture is a slight twist on the usual theme - this time we have an over-lifted skip, which was spotted by our very own Garbage Guru. You don’t see that every day!
As ever, send us your overloaded skip photos or stories and any other good skip-related stuff you spot on your travels. Email your entries through to us or post them to - The Skip, Baxall Business Centre, Adswood Road, Stockport, SK3 8LF.
