A FEW years ago it was quite difficult to get your head around concepts like global warming and carbon footprints.
To many of us they were just words without any practical meaning.
Not any more.
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Months of almost daily rain followed by cloudless blue skies and the sun on our backs - in mid February, clearly point to something strange happening to our climate.
And on a mundane level the problem of landfill and the chronic amount of waste we all produce is graphically illustrated by the huge amount of traffic using the rows of skips in the back-street yards our councils prefer to refer to as Recycling and Household Waste Disposal Centres.'
Blackburn's own centre in George Street West is a classic of its kind.
Rain or shine from dawn until dusk at weekends there is a constant stream of cars, four by fours with trailers, vans and even taxis queueing to unload the week's accumulated rubbish in volumes which were undreamt of 20 years ago.
Whereas you were then in the minority if you had to make the journey with a bootfull of garden refuse or an old carpet today we all have something to get rid of every Saturday or Sunday even though we have several wheelie bins, boxes and sacks at home instead of the single dustbin of yesteryear.
And that's the problem.
Although those staffing places like Blackburn's centre clearly work flat out at weekends they are often so overwhelmed that by Sunday afternoon people are dumping everything in the non-recyclable skips because everywhere else is full to overflowing.
Sometimes even these containers are filled so fast that people start piles of rubbish on the ground.
What I'm leading up to is that these kind of places are no longer, to quote ex-Home Secretary Dr John Reid, "fit for purpose."
It's no good councils complaining about people despoiling the countryside by irresponsibly dumping waste in lay-bys and fields if they cannot provide an efficient alternative.
They should follow retailers and some councils in other parts of the country and move to out-of-town sites where there is room to organise a proper, large, easily-accessible facility where you can drive in and out without traffic jams.
Spending half a hour in a back-street traffic queue is not a satisfactory service in this day and age.
We all want to play our bit in recycling and certainly don't want to be buried in mounds of rubbish.
But that means investment in an efficient, 21st century answer to the issue, not a place that on many weekends looks more like the Steptoe and Son scrapyard immortalised in the black and white TV series of the 1960s.
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