RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30497, 20 July 1964, Page 20

RANDOM REMINDER

PAPER WORK

It’s maddening how unsatisfactorily undetailed some of those newspaper cable items can be. Here we were, reading about an English Bank Holiday, when we came to this dreadful impasse. The item had nothing to do with excursion trips to Margate, the pierrots on the pier, the shimmering sea and candy floss. No, it dealt with litter. The cable said that on a bank holiday, 20,000,000 picnickers scatter 10,000 tons of litter. This is an astonishing figure, for it means, we think, that each picnicker is responsible for about a pound of rubbish. It seems a lot, if it is measured in ice cream cones, or sweet papers. Perhaps they go in a lot for those

cardboard plates, through which one is so likely to thrust the knife in wrestling with the summer salad. But the full fascination of the figures was found later in the piece, when it stated that 250,000 men pick up the litter, and it costs £1,000,000 for them to do it. This means that each collector of refuse is responsible for 80 untidy picnickers, it means too that each of the workers receives £4, or a shilling for every one of his clients and according to our calculations each man gathers up 89.61 b of rubbish. The man who has spent a lifetime trying to inculcate children with the tidiness habit might not think it unusual for a

single soul to gather up 89.6 pounds of rubbish. The average housewife does it every day. And does she get paid £4 for her pains? Not likely. But look at it from the worker’s angle. He gets only about Is a poundweight for his work. And in crusts, cigarette butts, matches and chicken bones it must take some gathering. We might be quite in error here, but it seems that the man might be well advised to buy huge quantities of Blackpool rock and lace his litter with it He could perhaps double his money. As for us, we would go for those 6000 cars which, the same item said, were abandoned on British roads last year. , , .