Taexalia

wild.life

Charity Pollution and Littering

Last week my personal equilibrium was assaulted by an idiot from Scottish Hydro. This was later followed up by a pointless email from their customer service department who suggested I go and buy a sticker and decorate my door with it and their sales reps *may* adhere to the reques but, since the sticker is not legally binding, then again they may not.

This week my personal space, and indeed my personal equilibrium, has been assaulted by a charity no less.

Plastic bags are banned from my home. People who bring them in, even my mother-in-law, are given them back as they leave. Plastic bags are a scourge to the environment, whether they have a supermarket logo on them, or indeed a charity logo. As a person who sees the impact of plastic rubbish on wildlife, I detest them.

Since we moved here I have become increasingly appalled at the sheer volume of plastic sacks that are shoved through my letterbox by various charities (and companies trying to appear as charities). Some weeks I find myself with five different plastic bags begging for my old clothes. No-one, not even me, has enough clutter to fill these sacks. Each time one appears I have to take responsibility for the plastic piece of rubbish that it becomes because there is no-one to hand them back to.

Today, as I wandered to the kitchen for a coffee, I noticed that some idiot had left one of these sacks in my garden. Rather than walk four feet further and climb a thigh killing three steps to my front door and letterbox, they decided to simply dump their piece of DiabetesUK plastic waste in my garden. When I had collected the rubbish from my garden, I placed a call to the number on the sack to complain. You could say I reached the tipping point.

It seems that it is not even DiabetesUK who left the sack there, but a company they pay to deliver them. This means that the hard earned money that people donate to their charity is actually being used to pay non charity litter louts.

Having made the call, I then noticed that it wasn't just my garden that had been treated with such disrespect - the property next door also had a baggy dumped - this time on top of the wheelie bin at the top of the stairs. This property is empty and no-one will be there to collect the litter. When the wind picks up, I wonder what will happen to that piece of plastic waste?

Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Or the plastic islands in the Atlantic Ocean's Sargasso Sea?

Charity status should not mean these organisations are free to litter and pollute our world.