Episode 2 The Secret Life of Rubbish

MUSIC: "Telephone & Rubber Band" by Penguin Cafe Orchestra

These programmes reveal how the history of household rubbish

has influenced the world we live in today.

Take a look at this.

The refuse of a couple of days from one home.

In the second half of the 20th century,

the amount Britons threw away grew remorselessly,

sometimes increasing at 7% per year.

We actually walked in amongst that.

And I've had it up to my shoulders,

pulling the rubbish towards me.

MUSIC: "Sexy Boy" by Air

This film is about the 1970s and '80s.

Two big ideas that shape how we think now

emerged from the rubbish of these decades.

The first was privatisation of public services.

This began with refuse collection.

We worked right until the Sunday night,

midnight, for the council,

and then started the company at six o'clock,

officially, the next morning.

Was that scary?

Yeah, it was a bit scary, yes.

The other big idea from these years was environmental awareness.

This was inspired by a growing fear of our wastefulness.

There is, in fact, a general forecast of the breakdown of world society

in the first decades of the next century.

Making profits and being green aren't necessarily opposites.

But in the '70s and '80s,

they seemed like two sides of a conflict about fundamental values.

How to deal with our rubbish became a critical issue

that would decide the future of Britain.

I've always been interested in being a dustman from a very early age.

Before I even went to school, I was always out watching

the dustmen through the windows, got to know the guys.

And here I am with my granddad with my nan's pedal bin bucket

on my shoulder, and I hadn't even got to school age then.

Steve Jones' living room is like a scrap-book

of post-war waste management.

My nan got a brand new dustbin and I had my photograph taken with it.

When Steve was a child, Britain was still recovering

from the struggles of the Second World War.

By today's standards, people were poor.

Having little, they threw little away.

It's remembered as the era of "make do and mend"...

..when much of what was in the bin

was coal ash from the household fire.

That's why the men who took it away were called dustmen.

I always knew when the dustmen would be about.

And I always made a beeline for the dustcart. They all knew me,

used to take me in the cab, take me to the tip in the holidays

from school. They were just fantastic days, they really were.

In his early 20s, Steve got a job on the dust.

There's my old crew. I'm up there with the crew. There's me.

And he loved his work so much, he just couldn't stop himself.

I've got a lot of photographs all the way round, as you can see.

This is when is when I was on my holidays on the Isle of Wight.

I used to go out with the dustmen unofficially

and give them a hand on my holidays.

This is when I went to Cyprus.

Friend of mine was living out there at the time,

and they arranged for me to come out on the local dustcart

for my birthday that fell when I was out there.

So I went out with Theo, Achelis and Athos on their crew,

and they took me out all day

and I managed to get another couple of half days in before I came back.

The old habit doesn't die. I went to the landfill with them.

As we now know, austerity eventually gave way to plenty.

So by the time Steve was lifting bins,

Britain was producing over 20 million tonnes of rubbish a year.

This is what you get

when you throw bins on your shoulders year in, year out.

Everyone's got a muscle there,

but I suppose when you're lifting it just gets bigger.

We were shifting 28, 30 tonnes a day, and that's a lot of waste.

MUSIC: "Oh! You Pretty Things" by David Bowie

There was a lot of waste,

because, by the 1970s, Britain had become a consumer society.

Shopping for new things had become a national enthusiasm.

It gave people the sense that their lives were improving...

..and kept the economy going.

But as people bought more, they threw more away.

You worked up a sweat in the summer, all the dust stuck to you.

Kept you warm in the winter!

The consumer society relied on efficient waste management.

It had to be easy to throw out the old

so people had space for the new things they were buying.

The dustmen were the unsung heroes of the post-war economic boom.

It's now accepted that the profligacy of the early '70s

was the result of a wasteful mindset.

The individuals who create the waste are living in a world

where they're really encouraged to be oblivious to all that.

That's really the psychological effect of having

automated removal processes, and so on.

You become oblivious to it,

it's someone else's job to deal with it.

It was in 1979 that Britons got their wake-up call.

The nation's refuse collectors went on strike...

..part of what came to be known as the Winter of Discontent.

The rubbish rotting in the street had a profound impact.

Once people come across waste

and recognise it as something that they have produced,

it's part of them, it doesn't go away, it can come back

and bite them on the backside, so to speak,

then it's something much more uncanny.

It's being caught and spooked

by your own shadow - it's catching up with you.

The dustmen soon got a pay deal they were happy with.

But 1978 proved to be a turning point

in the history of modern Britain.

Those mountains of rubbish came to symbolise

a country that had gone wrong.

How to manage the waste became a critical issue

that would dominate political and even cultural life

for the next decade.

One immediate impact of the Winter of Discontent

was that a man with a radical idea for the waste management industry

found himself on the fringe of power.

There was a new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher.

This was great opportunity for businessman

and Tory councillor David Evans.

'If anyone has a reason to crack open the Krug at ten in the morning,

'it's David Evans.

'For the first time, shares in his company Brengreen

'have topped one pound.'

Brengreen was actually an office cleaning company.

But Evans believed it could do much more.

He set out to convince the new government that Brengreen

could take over some of the public cleansing work,

then being done by the state.

David Evans, who was the chairman of Brengreen at the time,

was a fairly political individual.

But it was more a question "Is there a market?

"Can we address that market,

"and is it possible to make money out of it?"

Richard Barlow was one of Evans' close advisors.

The two men soon had their eyes on refuse collection.

For over a century,

domestic waste had been managed by local authorities.

In some towns, that was why the council had come into being.

But there was no law against out-sourcing some of this work

to a private contractor.

Southend Council was then having trouble

with its refuse collection service.

Every time a new house was built in the town, the dustmen demanded

a bonus payment for collecting the rubbish from it.

Some routes, with lots of new houses,

had become extremely costly for the council.

There was also blatant corruption.

We used to pay management to falsify our timesheets.

What do you mean by that?

We could pay a tenner

and get 30 quid's worth of overtime on our timesheets.

Out of these local difficulties

came the birth of the privatisation of Britain's public services.

Because in 1981,

Southend Council handed over its refuse collection service

to David Evans to sort out.

We were scared. But we just thought, "Well, we're going to do it."

Privatisation meant the council's pay deals were scrapped overnight,

because all the dustmen were made redundant.

Most were re-hired, but on terms that suited the private contractor

a Brengreen subsidiary called Exclusive Cleaning.

Evans put Richard Barlow in charge of it.

We turned up one morning and all the vehicle locks had been superglued.

You have to find some solvent pretty quickly.

I mean, I...

we managed, but we were probably a couple of hours late

getting on the job.

But we worked through it and caught up later in the day.

I went to see the men in December to talk to them,

and two police officers and dogs

thought they ought to accompany me to meet the men.

I didn't get a chance to meet the men because they were shouting,

"Unions in, Evans out." Never met them before.

One of them spat in my face, and the policemen suggested

that we retreated as quickly as possible

as they feared for my safety.

There were strikes. But they were partial strikes.

I don't think we lost the whole workforce at all.

Certain people were going on strike,

and, I mean, we dismissed some of them.

It was a lot easier in those days than it would be today.

Cleverly, Richard Barlow bought himself goodwill.

So much money was saved by ending the bonus schemes and corruption

that he could raise the basic wage of those who were kept on.

What do you do if you get an offer which is better

than the one at present do you refuse or do you take it?

This is the whole dilemma.

Our wage was so low for years and years.

Not just a few months, but for years.

We were on a pittance of a wage with Southend Council.

And when this company came along with a much better offer,

we had to take it, it's as simple as that.

It took about three months to settle down.

After that, things became normal.

Were you able to turn a profit?

Yes, we were, thank goodness.

Margaret Thatcher had come to power

promising to clean up the mess that Britain was in.

David Evans believed he had shown her how this could be done.

Because, despite its profits,

Exclusive Cleaning was charging Southend's ratepayers

half a million pounds a year less

than when the council had collected the rubbish.

Everyone seems to agree

that what happened here in Southend was a revolution.

And, right now, it seems to be one that's spreading.

Up and down the country,

there are no fewer than 117 other local authorities

who have paid £100 each

for copies of Southend's privatisation blueprint.

Privatisation had begun.

But there was a rival reaction to the Winter of Discontent.

It was also a watershed in the environmental movement.

In the '70s, some in Britain came to believe

that the consumer society

was creating an environmental catastrophe.

They now hoped that the streets filled with rotting rubbish

would make more people aware of society's wastefulness.

We were dealing with a culture

that had been a throwaway culture for many years

and changing attitudes to that is, in fact, probably the hardest job.

John Barton is a scientist.

In the '70s and early '80s,

he was based in the national laboratories at Warren Spring.

He was working on a government research programme

called the War on Waste.

Its policy document declared that,

"We all instinctively feel there is something wrong in a society

"which wastes and discards resources on such a scale as we do today."

Warren Spring started looking at the refuse

mainly as a source of raw materials and that was about in '72, '73.

When you say "refuse", you mean the household bin?

The household rubbish, yeah.

So you'd be sat in front of a pile of rubbish,

you might size it

into different size fractions,

but, essentially, you'd just pick out everything that was in there

and put them into different piles.

John found that valuable resources, which could have been recycled

back into the productive economy, were just being thrown away.

If you go to countries like India - areas of the world

that are resource-poor and labour-rich -

they have always recycled.

We were resource-rich and labour-poor in the '70s

and so labour costs were high, resources were cheap,

so it was quite a task to get people motivated to say, "Hang on a sec,

"we shouldn't just be throwing this stuff away."

The critical need for a War on Waste had been proved by science.

In 1972, in an experiment called The Limits To Growth,

an international panel of statisticians

looked into the future of the planet.

Instead of a crystal ball, they used a computer.

They programmed in predictions of population expansion

and economic activity.

The results were shocking.

From a very large number of computer runs,

making various assumptions, adopting various maxima and minima,

there is, in fact, a general forecast of a breakdown

of world society in the first decades of the next century.

MUSIC: "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" by REM

The Limits To Growth suggested the world faced a stark choice...

..cut down waste or face imminent global collapse.

Margaret Thatcher prided herself on her ability to make tough choices.

And in 1983, following victory in the Falklands War,

she had just been re-elected

with the largest majority for a generation.

Thatcher now had the power to give Britain any medicine

she thought it needed.

Kevin Taggart collected her rubbish at the private residence

she had owned since before becoming Prime Minister.

Yeah, Flood Street. I've done it on one of the gangs.

Yeah. Her and Denis used to live there, and, yeah...

Flood Street is in Kensington and Chelsea.

Though one of the wealthiest parts of Britain,

it's a tough place for a dustman.

On mornings, it is hard pulling all them rubbish up.

I think this is still probably one of the only areas you pull it up

from the basement still. A lot of it is downstairs.

And that is hard, I think.

Kensington and Chelsea was one of the first local authorities

to copy Southend and privatise refuse collection.

I finished on a Friday with Kensington and Chelsea,

I was in on overtime on the Saturday morning,

and then Monday morning, just a whole new workforce, virtually.

And started at half six, seven in the morning,

I finished at eight at night. I was doing 13 hours.

That's until they learnt to get the hang of it.

They had to go round all these roads, cos it was all virtually new men,

never done dusting in their life, and it is quite hard at first.

Margaret Thatcher was about to get a householder's view of privatisation.

Nobody said to us, "Look, if you don't make it work in Flood Street,

"this is the end of it."

Kevin's new boss was a businessman called Roger Hewitt.

Like David Evans, Roger was a true believer in privatisation.

Both I and my colleagues realised that we had to make it work.

If it didn't work, then it was going to go backwards -

you wouldn't see that philosophy, that strategy, expanded.

Therefore it had to work.

Then, on the first morning

that Flood Street was scheduled to have its bins cleared,

the refuse collector's worst enemy appeared in force heavy snow.

But, clearly, if we managed not to turn up

because there was a few inches of snow,

I think the Prime Minister would have been right in saying,

"Look, this strategy has to work

"within the weather patterns this country has,

"and it does snow here."

Despite the weather,

the rubbish was collected from Flood Street on schedule.

Yeah, you must have a lot of pride.

I've been doing it 30 years now, near enough,

so...a bit of pride.

I did meet the Prime Minister subsequently.

It came up in the conversation

and her comment was that she was pleased, no more than that.

In fact, when Roger Hewitt's company began collecting Thatcher's bins,

the progress of privatisation was already unstoppable.

In the '80s, Thatcher was fighting a running battle

with Britain's local authorities.

She accused them of being bloated spendthrifts.

And in 1988, a new Local Government Act was passed.

It enforced what was called "competitive tendering"

for various local authority activities -

including refuse collection.

From now on, household bins would be emptied

by whoever gave the best value for money.

Widespread privatisation followed immediately.

Bob Seear and Ian Ross

had their lives turned upside down in the '80s.

It's engaged!

In 1986, they appeared in a television programme about how

Westminster Council cleaned up the mess of a Royal wedding.

It's packed outside the Abbey.

And there's quite a lot of stuff building up already.

Any more rubbish, please?

Have you got any more rubbish for me? Thank you.

-Put it forward and we'll get rid of it for you.

-I'm ever so sorry!

'I started as a dustman in 1969

'and worked my way through to become assistant director,'

working my way up the hard way, really.

I'd been there since '73.

Like Ian, I ended up as assistant director in charge

of the street cleansing operation.

Captain Bob has come to the rescue

with his little fleet of mobile loos!

I'll take you all out for a drink.

Thank you, Ian. Look forward to that!

Have you got any money on you?

A year after they became TV stars,

Bob and Ian became caught up in the progress of privatisation.

Because when Westminster Council invited tenders

for its refuse collection service,

Bob and Ian took on the contract themselves.

I think the film was a great help to us.

It was just two years from the film to winning the contract.

Without that film, it would have been harder for us to have won.

We had the knowledge and everything so why shouldn't we give it a go?

As you know, it is a very important day. I'll be with you all day long.

'It's a bit of a shock

'when you've worked for the council for 20 years and suddenly...'

So you didn't have time to really think about things,

we had to make it work.

Because obviously we'd put our houses on the line,

our families had backed us, so we just couldn't afford to fail.

We worked right till the Sunday night, midnight, for the council,

and then started the company at six o'clock,

officially, the next morning.

Was that scary?

It was a bit scary, yes.

Bob and Ian's company collected rubbish

in Westminster for six years,

and won about 20 other contracts across the south-east.

It was eventually sold for millions of pounds.

You have one chance, don't you?

Everybody gets a little bit of luck.

Most people don't realise it's in their hands,

so you've got to take that opportunity.

The privatisation of waste management

was the beginning of a period of structural change.

MUSIC: "Ghost Town" by The Specials

The Thatcher government sold off £29 billion worth

of public utilities and nationalised industries.

This led to a new emphasis in the British public services.

Instead of being managed by the state's bureaucrats,

the country was now being served by its entrepreneurs.

This was more than a new economics, it was a new culture -

a shift away from a society

that depended on collective responsibility

to one built on individualism.

Not everyone bought into the values of '80s Britain.

The green movement was deeply suspicious of the profit motive.

This doubt dated right back to the establishment

of the environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth.

In 1971, activists blocked the doorstep of Schweppes's headquarters

with empty bottles.

Friends of the Earth were trying to highlight

how disposable packaging

was a key contributor to Britain's mountain of rubbish.

It was no joke when there was a strike in London and there were lots

of bits and pieces lying around and rats and flies and Lord knows what.

It's seriously irresponsible of the packaging industry

to compound this problem when really they should be helping

all the rest of us

look at the refuse disposal problem and solve it.

Schweppes didn't change its policy.

A spokesperson for the packaging industry admitted why.

It's more convenient for the housewife

to have disposable packages.

It's also more profitable for your companies, of course.

This had not escaped me.

Many environmentalists came to believe that private businesses

would never reduce waste because that meant less profits.

Nice to see you again.

But then someone found a way to make money out of recycling.

Even my closest friends called me a crank,

and said that nobody would do this, but I knew they would.

In 1977, in this car park in Barnsley,

Ron England opened the first bottle bank.

He was an engineer in a local glass-making company,

and knew that the technology existed for recycling bottle glass.

But to make this process viable, he needed a steady supply of empties.

We came up with Bottle Bank.

We didn't want some of the window pane glass going into the banks,

so by saying "Bottle Bank", it shows people it's a bottle.

The actual symbol on the first bottle banks

was actually a bottle with two Bs around it,

so we were trying to say to the public, "Bottles please."

With stories about an environmental apocalypse hitting the headlines,

a trip to the Bottle Bank made people feel good about themselves.

Buckingham Palace got one.

And when a Bottle Bank appeared on another national treasure,

Ron knew he'd pulled it off.

And if you look closely on Coronation Street on the wall

by the doctor's surgery, there is some bottle banks there,

so bottle banks became part of everyday life.

MUSIC: Theme from "Coronation Street"

Bottle banks were joined by banks for paper, aluminium,

and old clothes.

By the mid-'80s,

supermarket car parks were becoming mini recycling centres.

We started to do quite a bit of public attitude survey work

when these recycling systems came in, and clearly everyone,

attitude-wise,

more or less 80-90% all think it's a good thing.

When you actually talk about their behaviour

"When did you last go to a bottle bank?" -

then they are scratching their heads

and they wouldn't be able to remember.

So attitude great, behaviour appalling,

and that's the bottom line.

It turned out that only a fraction of the recyclables

in the waste stream were getting picked up by the bring system.

It was clear that an effective recycling system would have

to deal with the rubbish in the household bin.

Only a generation earlier, during the Second World War,

the waste management industry had recovered

millions of tons of critical resources from people's bins.

This had been possible

because citizens sorted their rubbish on their own doorstep.

But those were the days of "we're all in it together".

Britain was now in the age of the individual.

We took a fairly pessimistic view about human nature in those days,

and we thought that, from an attitude perspective,

that we had to deal with the waste as we found it.

John Barton believed technology could compensate

for the failings of modern Britons.

Because people wouldn't sort their rubbish,

he set out to devise a machine that would do this for them.

The history of waste management contains many technological fixes

that worked but didn't last.

In the early 20th century,

incinerators had reduced rubbish to ash,

using the heat this created to generate electricity.

However, the noxious fumes this produced were expensive to clean,

and incineration fell out of fashion.

By the late '70s, 90% of British rubbish went to landfill.

This led to experiments that sought to reduce

the volume of the waste going into the ground.

The flats on this council estate in Sheffield

all had a powerful liquidiser below the sink.

Even tin cans could just be flushed away.

The system didn't catch on.

Here in Suffolk, Mike Leeks ran another machine

that was once considered the great hope of waste management.

You're walking on pulverised waste here.

There's no soil at all, no soil was put on this at all, no.

This is straight onto pulverised refuse.

The pulveriser turned rubbish into granulated muck.

This encouraged it to decompose until it looked

and behaved like soil.

An orchard has been planted on Mike's pulverised rubbish.

But even as it was being pioneered, this technique was becoming

out of date. There were new plastics coming into use

that were too tough for the pulveriser.

Heavy plastics, hard plastics...

would just come out as they went in, really.

They'd just been knocked about.

You know, you couldn't really break them up.

During the '70s, the share of the household bin that was plastic

rose from about 1% to close to 10%.

There's polythene, plastic bags, Fairy liquid bottle,

very little... It hasn't even gone in 40 years. It's still the same.

Mike's pulveriser was scrapped.

And this approach came to be considered another costly mistake.

John Barton was undaunted by previous engineering failures.

He knew the automated rubbish sorter could work,

because he was building it out of proven technologies.

We pinched our technologies from other sectors,

so from the agricultural sector they had machines

which sorted the wheat from the chaff.

That was our basic classifier

for taking paper out from glass bottles.

They had stoners to take stones out of potatoes.

We used those to separate things out.

Anything that had been used in the coal industry, we used that.

Glass sorting into different colours -

there were optical sorting machines that were used

in the diamond mines in South Africa.

They could tell if something was transparent or opaque.

We used those.

It was somewhat Heath Robinson.

But John Barton had got the first scent of victory

in the war on waste.

That's what we did, we created these sorting technologies

that took the raw dirty waste and sorted out the different materials -

glass, metals, paper, plastic.

But outside the walls of John Barton's government laboratory,

environmentalism was changing.

The remote prospect of global collapse

had always been hard to grasp and easy to forget about.

The growing volume of waste only got into the headlines

when it was badly managed.

So, for many, environmental awareness

came to mean immediate safety from pollution.

One scandal of industrial waste exemplified this attitude.

It was quite an amazing story that happened in February 1972

in Bermuda Village, which was then a sleepy mining village

on the outskirts of Nuneaton.

And it was a story that ended up making national headlines,

and even international headlines.

In 1972, Mike Malyon was a reporter on his local paper,

Coventry's Evening Tribune.

In those days this was an old lane - not even as well built as this -

a lane coming down to what used to be a mining village,

and there were just fields all the way around.

But this was the site, there was no fence up around it,

it was all just open ground.

And it was like a derelict site. The kids just used to play around on it.

And on this spot there was one policeman

standing with his arms folded - uniformed policeman -

and a pile of oil drums behind him.

And we walked over and said, "What's going on, mate?"

And he said, "Someone's dumped a load of cyanide here."

And we didn't realise the significance of it, and said,

"What's the problem?" And he said, "Well, let me put it this way.

"There's enough cyanide here to wipe out the whole of Nuneaton."

The drums of poison weren't contraband.

Cyanide was a completely legal waste.

One source of it was a big local employer - the car industry.

Chrome was then the fashion.

One way to get this shiny finish was in a bath of sodium cyanide,

which then had to be disposed of.

That's the front page

the day after the drums were discovered on that site.

"Poison drums start major police alert. Drums of deadly poison

"were dumped in Bermuda Village

"on a site used as a children's playground."

And we told the editor,

"What about tipping off some of... It's a national story -

"what about tipping off some of the national newspapers?"

And he said, "Go ahead."

And it was headlines in the national news,

headlines in the papers the next day.

Daily Mirror had a big splash headline across their paper

and they actually made it into a campaign.

With five million readers,

the Mirror was then the biggest-selling paper in Britain.

Their Doomwatch campaign led to copycat scandals and a media storm.

Mike Malyon had struck a nerve.

I was 22 at the time, so I was quite a young reporter, really.

It was probably the biggest story I'd dealt with up to that time.

It really did have repercussions, major repercussions,

nationally as well as locally.

The cyanide scandal was a critical event in waste management.

The press exposed the fact that there weren't adequate laws

to prevent poisons being disposed of in a way that endangered lives.

The Environment Secretary, Peter Walker,

went on TV to promise this would change.

One can't have a continuing situation where people can dump

dangerous solids and liquids which could possibly endanger

the very life of children and animals and water supplies

without seeing very tough measures introduced to stop them.

But the Government held back from banning the use of cyanide

or other toxic chemicals which would have been restricting

the practices of industry and stifling economic activity.

Instead, about a month after the cyanide story broke,

Parliament passed a new waste management law -

the Deposit Of Dangerous Wastes Act.

More waste laws followed. All were aimed at pollution prevention.

Britons weren't changing their wasteful behaviour,

but they were assured the environment was safe,

because the waste management industry was now obliged

to clean up the mess.

Nobody did this better than a landfill operation

in the most unlikely of places - Packington Hall,

seat of the Earls of Aylesford.

It started, I guess, when my grandfather died in 1958.

We had, inevitably, a death duty bill to face,

and, as luck would have it,

there's a fair amount of sand and gravel around on the estate,

so that was the first port of call to meet the bill.

So having extracted the gravel

and paid the death duties, we were left with a hole.

It was a deep hole, over 300 acres in area -

the size of a small town.

The Aylesfords realised they could make even more money

by charging local authorities to tip rubbish in it.

But landfill had a reputation

as the cheap and nasty approach to waste disposal.

Historically, people had taken...

had a hole in the ground, tipped and ran.

We had to take a slightly different approach because

we'd been here 300 years and we hoped to be here another 300,

so we were very conscious from the word go that whatever

we did in that site was going to haunt us for years to come.

In 1986, in Loscoe in Derbyshire, two homes were destroyed

when gas seeping out of an old landfill exploded.

I was fast asleep and then it was all the noise that woke me up.

I heard a terrific crack and then all the rumbling noise.

When I opened my eyes, there was a giant flame just above my face,

and that disappeared and I could see the roof timbers and the sky.

What happened at Loscoe could happen at any landfill.

The problem was that Britons were throwing out too much food.

Almost 30% of late 20th-century rubbish

was organic matter.

As it rotted away underground, it produced methane,

which is highly flammable.

Methane can continue to be produced for 20 years

after the last load of rubbish is buried.

A landfill could become a huge ticking bomb.

But Packington turned this explosive liability into an asset.

This is an electricity generator, which runs off methane gas

that has been piped out of Packington landfill.

Rotting rubbish buried here decades ago is still producing enough power

to light up 10,000 homes.

This harnessing of the energy from waste made even burying it

seem environmentally-friendly.

But some still claimed landfill

was just sweeping the problem under the carpet.

The War On Waste declared the only long-term solution

was to reduce the amount of rubbish that Britain threw away.

This was the purpose of John Barton's pioneering recycling plant,

which opened in Doncaster in 1979.

We built what today we'd call a materials recycling facility.

Exactly the same sort of equipment - rotary screens, magnets,

air classifiers, optical sorters,

conveyers all over the place,

hand-picking belts.

You wouldn't know if you walked into the Doncaster plant now

that it wasn't just a modern materials recycling facility.

What you're saying is

you scrapped the technological problems of recycling?

Yes, we basically cracked that, but we didn't crack the markets,

we didn't crack public perception

and we certainly didn't crack the economics.

John had hoped that local authorities would be able to afford

the cost of processing household waste in a recycling plant,

because the resources it extracted from the rubbish would be sold back

into the productive economy.

But soon after it started up, Doncaster was only getting

about 10p worth of recyclables out of the typical household bin.

For example, the steel - well, that industrial sector was wiped out

in the early '80s and we had thousands of tonnes of bales of steel

sticking in the corner of the plant at Doncaster

and in the end we had to pay someone to take them away.

The recycling plant failed the critical test

of '80s waste management.

This was hugely more expensive

than disposing of rubbish in landfill,

which, thanks to Packington, now even seemed environmentally sound.

So, after just a few years of operation,

John's brainchild was scrapped.

Essentially, we were dealing with an economic circumstance

in which landfill became king.

I remember sitting on the floor of the Doncaster waste recycling plant

in about 1984, 1985, with a colleague,

and we laughed till we cried.

The war on waste was lost.

Throughout the '80s, the waste stream continued to expand,

as dustmen recall to this day.

The '80s, yeah.

There was no limit to what people wanted to put in the bins.

What they wanted to put in, they put in.

Paul Couchman has been collecting bins for over 30 years.

I enjoy the job, really enjoy the job.

We have a laugh and joke,

take a bit of mickey out of each other.

But back in the '80s, being a dustman wasn't always funny.

The nappies, they'd actually fall down your back,

with whatever they'd got in.

Disposable nappies had been invented a generation before,

but only really took off in Britain during the late 20th century.

They were just one flow within a waste flood of disposable goods.

Pens, razors, shopping bags,

were now being used once then thrown away.

Despite rising concern for the environment,

people were choosing convenience.

The waste management industry was struggling to keep up.

That's probably one of the old ones.

Brian Carter came up with a simple solution to more waste -

bigger bins.

This is a 1983 one...

..which we originally anticipated would last ten years

and it's still going strong.

Here, in Bury, Lancashire, in the housing estate

where his family lived, Brian introduced the wheelie bin.

Though well-established in Europe, the wheelie bin

was completely new to Britain.

That's a 1983 one.

It led to an immediate doubling

in the efficiency of the refuse collection.

Two men were doing what previously four men did.

HE LAUGHS

Also, there was less spillage,

as the new bins had heavy flip-top lids.

It was capacity, cleanliness, one-shot job.

It was the way of doing it.

It was so successful after the first 12 months

that the authority decided

they would then go through the whole borough with it.

Bury was followed by other local authorities.

In the '80s, the wheelie bin

spread across Britain like the latest craze.

They used to call me, in the first few years,

the king of the wheelie bins!

But many local authorities reported that the wheelie bin

led to an immediate increase in the waste stream.

At 240 litres, the wheelie bins could handle

three times as much rubbish as the traditional dustbins they replaced.

And local authorities soon discovered

that people were filling them up.

This was because of what's known as Parkinson's Law of Rubbish -

the more bin space households have, the more they throw away.

It's a fundamental flaw that undermines

improvements in waste management to this day.

Back in the 1980s, disposal systems became more efficient than ever,

thanks to another clever idea pioneered at Packington Hall.

Here, a land-FILL was being turned into a land-HILL.

Clearly, we were enjoying the income benefits of the landfill -

it was doing wonders for the estate,

we could actually upgrade the properties -

and it become also clear that there was a finite life to this.

So we actually looked around and suddenly thought,

"Why don't we have a go at going up here?

"Perhaps we can get away with a hill."

The man who devised the landhill

was one of the most influential figures in waste management.

He was the site manager at Packington - Tony Biddle.

Oh, he was absolutely key.

You will hear people saying everything from eccentric, mad,

very intelligent.

He became totally single-minded about the site.

Biddle was a contradictory figure.

Despite managing a vast landfill,

he talked like an environmental activist.

Undoubtedly, there is room for improvement in any industry,

let alone the waste-management industry.

What I would like to see by way of improvement, for instance,

I would like to see Margaret Thatcher wearing green underwear

rather than green cosmetic.

I would like to see Margaret Thatcher with a green heart.

He was a bit of an eccentric.

But he was a well-liked character.

Kevin Lane worked alongside Biddle for 20 years.

He used to always wear plus fours, garters and a hat.

A very colourful character.

And he used to have a whistle round his neck.

And if he wanted to get anybody's attention

you could hear him whistling and shouting,

and that's how you knew when he was approaching anybody.

And he used to always have an Alsatian dog with him.

Everywhere he went, his dog was his loyal friend.

Apart from me, that was.

Biddle's plan for the landhill was hugely ambitious.

It would be 55 metres high

and would take a generation to fill with waste.

We actually had a full-scale model made of what it would look like

when it was finished. 55 metres above original contour

over nearly 300 acres was a concept that might be a bit alarming,

but by actually making a full-scale model,

we could see ourselves that it actually fitted in reasonably well,

it was going to be absolutely fine.

Going up increased capacity at no extra cost.

And Biddle pointed out that it was easier to control pollution risks

above ground level.

Local authorities were quick to take advantage

of this cheap and apparently environmentally sound

disposal system.

We used to have them queuing half a mile down the road to get in.

If you think, you've watched it grow from zero to what it is now...

I mean, I've seen virtually millions of tonnes of waste

come through the gates.

Packington was so successful

it became a role model in waste disposal...

..and vast hills of rubbish remade the British landscape.

Landhills created what seemed to be

limitless capacity for waste disposal.

They even seemed pollution-free.

So people no longer had to worry about their wastefulness.

And during the 1980s, excess became acceptable.

The hill at Packington is nearly complete now.

The eastern side has been grassed over, and looms over the deer park.

Beyond it stretches a plateau, hundreds of acres across -

all made of rubbish.

All of this area here...

has been... There's landfill waste underneath that, there.

Tony Biddle died before Packington reached its full magnificence.

But Kevin Lane still feels the gaze of his old boss

watching over the hill he helped create.

Just beyond the chimneys

is where Mr Biddle lived.

And when he passed away,

rather than being in a cemetery or whatever,

they laid him to rest in the bottom of the garden,

I think it was. And rather than sort of laying him flat,

they sort of laid him on an angle

facing the landfill site,

so we all look now and we know he's looking at us.

So, yeah, over there, he's looking at us now.

It's not just Packington that's being grassed over.

All over Britain,

landfills are closing -

sometimes before they're full.

This is because evidence of man-made climate change

has made resources precious again.

So the waste-management industry is finding ways to preserve them,

often returning to techniques lost since the mid-20th century.

Separating our rubbish into different bins makes us feel better.

But improving waste management isn't enough.

Recycling systems can use as much energy as they save,

and some 70% of household rubbish isn't recycled.

At the heart of 1940s Britain

was a mindset exemplified by "make do and mend" -

people only threw away what they could no longer find a use for.

That way of thinking is not being rediscovered.

We still create rubbish like there's no tomorrow,

and expect the waste management industry to clear up our mess.

# My old man's a dustman

# He wears a dustman's hat

# He wears cor blimey trousers

# And he lives in a council flat

# He looks a proper nana

# In his great big hobnailed boots

# He's got such a job to pull 'em up

# That he calls them daisy roots

# Oh, my old man's a dustman

# He wears a dustman's hat

# He wears cor blimey trousers

# And he lives in a council flat... #

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