Do you ever think about the amount of rubbish that we throw away?

We’ve just been to the tip with a car full and, as usual, the place was busy.

I think that there must be at least four or five ’civic amenity sites’ dotted around the Island.

We live in Onchan so we use the one opposite the Pulrose power station.

The principle behind the amenity site is recycle and re-use. There are specially labelled skips for most categories, and it never fails to amaze me just what two old codgers in their late seventies do actually throw away.

I like the idea that folk can take things to the amenity site that are still usable.

You could say that one man’s rubbish is another man’s three piece suite.

I remember when we lived at Greeba we would use the site at St Johns, locally known as ’Harrods’.

In fact, I think that the St Johns site, under the command of Brian Caley and Michael Callin, set the standard that current sites now follow.

The story goes that if a regular user of the site was on the lookout for something particular, he could place an order at the site hut, just in case whatever they were looking for happened to turn up.

When I was a lad, the municipal tip for Douglas was always at Pulrose. It was what is now known as a landfill site.

Household rubbish was usually just the ashes from our open fires and a few tin cans and bottles. This was simply dumped, spread out, and flattened and, eventually the site would be used to build on.

For example most of the National Sports Centre and a fair lump of Pully golf course was built on reclaimed land.

But it’s impossible to compare what we dumped long ago with what we throw away now.

In fact some of today’s rubbish hadn’t even been invented fifty or sixty years ago.

It is typical of today’s society that we don’t just buy something because we need it, we buy something because we think that we need it.

We were a family of five, mother, father and three children. We had one wireless, powered by a rechargeable battery called an accumulator.

This was our one and only link to the outside world for news and entertainment. Now we are a family of two and, after a quick recce around the bungalow, I am embarrassed to admit that I counted four TVs, six radios and three computers.

Now I’m sure that you are all familiar with the first law of thermodynamics.

This simply states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Let’s imagine that we must have a new fridge. There’s just the two of us, so we really need one of those big double door jobs.

We convince ourselves that we must have some new oak furniture, a new car, a new TV, or even a new house.

We need the power that comes from oil, gas and coal, we need electricity to keep our selves cool in summer and warm in winter, and we don’t like those huge wind generators because they spoil the view. And so on. But don’t forget, matter cannot be created or destroyed.

It just changes shape. Sooner or later, all our natural resources will have changed into a huge pile of old cars, fridges and furniture.

The tropical rain forests are being lost because we need more grass to fatten up our beef burgers and more palm oil to fry the chips that fatten up us.

We are all enjoying the heatwave. The snag is that the breweries and the fizzy drinks makers are rapidly running out of stock of the Co2 that they need to make their products sparkle . Ironically, the heatwave that we are enjoying, is more than likely the result of the global warming that we are suffering because of the build up of Co2

in the atmosphere.

Cheers!