Rubbish!

We can no longer cope with our waste. Every hour in the UK we throw away enough rubbish to fill the Albert hall – a statistic quoted so often that perhaps we’ve stopped imagining what it means. And every year the flow accelerates.
This is the story of our rubbish – from the first human bowel movement to the littering of outer space. With a hankerchief to his nose, Girling picks through our fridge mountain, our crumbling sewers, trading waste, packaging waste, hazardous industrial waste… it is a mucky saga of carelessness, greed and opportunism, wasted opportunity and official bungling. But Rubbish! is also a plea for us to consider other kinds of waste: the trashing of our landscape, the unstoppable floods of junk that clog our mailboxes, litter the skies and foul the airwaves…
Rubbish! may not be a conventional battle cry but this is unmistakably a call to arms – not just for the three ‘R’s – reduce, re-use, recycle – but for us to fight for new ideas, brave initiative rather than reliance on old systems that are crumbling before our eyes.