Political Proposal.

[Bewlay Bros]

I am contemplating writing to my MP, or the Environment Secretary (whose name I have forgotten) re my proposal.

Plastic bottles etc do not even start to decompose until at least 50,000 years and glass is pretty much rot free. Until the relatively recent green movement, much landfill is composed of plastic and glass thus fuelling carbon emissions as they very slowly rot and poison the actual soil.

I propose that our prison population and asylum seekers waiting their 6 months before a decision should dig around in the vast landfills and even new ones where irresponsible wasters throw their plastic, tin and glass away with their general refuse.

Naturally I would give them protective clothing and even masks. They will work an 8 hour day simply gathering plastic, metal, glass, old car tyres and anything safe to recycle.

This has numerous benefits.

1) It will be good for the environment (first and foremost)

2) It will make a little money re private recycling companies that can be ploughed in to the prison service

3) It is a slightly demenaing task which will add further punishment to prisoners.

4) It is manual work thus reducing prison obesity.

5) It may make a few asylum seekers think twice about applying for "Good Ol' Blighty" as a safe option

Shall I write with this idea or is it a load of weey pants. If so, how can my agenda be bettered?

[Lucy Thomas]

I think you are all wrong about the bio-degradability of plastic. I actually think it may be shorter than most people think.

There have been many archaeological digs in Britain and around the world. Never in one of these digs have any plastic bottles ever been found. Even in Victorian excavations they have never found any let alone mediaeval sites or Roman ones.

I think that this proves that the bio-degradability of plastic bottles is somewhere around 50 years.

[jake-the-peg]

There are some ethical issues here despite the ecological ones.

Firstly we should only be punishing criminals, if an asylum seeker or an economic migrant is awaiting a decision or is on a visa then they've done nothing wrong and shouldn't be punished for it.

If they overstay their visa or are here illegally then they're effectively criminals and shouldn't be treated as special cases.

There are then general issues relating to putting convicts (of any type ) to work.

Firstly you shouldn't be depriving commerical organisations of their bread and butter or undercutting them. If you were running a recycling company I dare say you'd not be best pleased to hear that you were going to lose work and lay people off because of unpaid forced labour.

Secondly there's the security issue already raised. - Construct special prisons enclosing closed landfill sites perhaps

Thirdly there's health and safety. If you're putting people to work like this you've got to be able to be reasonably sure of their safety. I'm not an expert but I'd suspect there are ground stability risks and risks of being buried under a collapsed heap there's almost certainly more to it than a few suits.

Having said that if (and it's quite a big if) you can get around these issues there's no overring reason I can think of not to do something like this.

Can't see it helping recruitment of prison officers though!

[Oneeyedvic]

I think that I must have been on this site too long - I actually think that the principle is quite good. As Jake says, there are a number of concerns, but the principle seems fairly sound to me.