Call off of the quangos, cancel the committees, and stop the investigations. I, Simon Howard, have discovered why the UK is so poor at recycling, reducing waste volume, and helping the environment.

It is, it would appear, due to the existence of people like Helen Veale, executive producer of Channel 4’s most recent reality TV show Dumped. From a piece she wrote for Guardian Unlimited:

Before Dumped it had never really occurred to me that when you throw something away it actually goes somewhere.

Wow. An executive producer commissioned to make a programme about rubbish for one of the UK’s biggest TV channels didn’t know that rubbish went somewhere after she’d put it in her bin. Presumably, on par with the scientific knowledge of most TV producers, she thought it disapparated, like things do in Harry Potter.

And just to further exemplify her knowledge of the subject matter on which she’s produced a programme:

[T]he whole point is that everyone seems to think that “the environment” is something that happens far away, in foreign countries, caused by other people.

Who is this “everyone”? I don’t think I know anyone who thinks that. And, frankly, it’s incredibly depressing if anyone does - let alone someone producing a programme about the environment.

The concept of Dumped actually strikes me as rather good, but now I’m worried that it will be spoiled by ‘revelations’ like the fact that my rubbish goes to landfill, and doesn’t simply disappear. With Ms Veale executive producing, I’m not holding out much hope.

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