Digging A Hole

Every day on the way to and from work, I drive past two really unpleasant things. The first of those is a wholesale compost place. So basically every morning while I’m still struggling to come to terms with being awake, I get to breathe in the lovely, heady aroma of animal crap and rotting dirt. The scent is particularly unpleasant on a cold, wet morning. On those days you can often see the mounds of compost steaming in the crisp morning air, and the pungent aroma of organic poo burns your nostrils as you drive past. Then after a hard day at the office, I get to have the entire experience all over again on the way home.


The second place is a tip/quarry. It’s not as stench-o-rific as the compost place, but it’s dirty and dusty and there are often stray bits of plastic bag or paper floating around.


The thing that really stumps me about a tip is that no one has yet come up with a better idea for waste disposal. Despite all the amazing leaps and bounds that are being made in every scientific field, not a single person has come up with a better idea for rubbish disposal than digging a great big hole and chucking the trash in there. That’s right, a hole. It might be a very big and impressive hole, but it’s still just a hole. Surgeons have been able to transplant entire faces onto other people. A man has walked on the freaking moon, and yet we still can’t come up with a better idea than digging a great big hole and turfing all our junk into it?


I think the problem is that claiming that you’ve invented a way to dispose of rubbish isn’t nearly as impressive as claiming that you’ve cloned a sheep, or that you’ve invented a bionic eye. And because of that, a dirty big hole in the ground has been deemed sufficient as a means of rubbish disposal. Instead of coming up with a better idea, we just call it 'landfill', as though taking out all the dirt and filling the hole back up with dirty nappies, plastic bags and coffee cups is actually a good solution. I can almost imagine the person who first filled an old quarry up with trash giving themselves a pat on the back and saying "Well done! We've killed two birds with one stone with this! We've filled up a hole and we've disposed of our trash!"


I think our scientists need to re-prioritise.


And I'm not saying all this because I'm a hippy, greeny type person. I'm just a regular person who thinks a hole is a very unoriginal and un-inventive way of getting rid of rubbish. In fact, the idea of digging holes and hiding things in them was something I came up with on my own when I was about three.
That's all I'm saying.