Give rubbish a thought

IT's a problem that just won't go away - and it's getting worse.

Thousands of tonnes of rubbish, from tea bags to tables and chairs, are dumped in Sussex every week and the amount is growing.

Most of us don't think too hard about what we throw in the

bin, whether at home or at work,

and we rarely give a second thought

to what happens to our rubbish after that.

But we will soon HAVE to start thinking and making a bigger effort than ever before - buying goods with less packaging, and recycling and reusing as much as we can.

East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove Council have got together and produced plans calling for most of the rubbish that isn't already reused to be burned in two new incinerators.

In West Sussex, councillors will soon sit down and draw up their own proposals.

Burners will be among the options they have to consider too.

Nobody wants an incinerator on their doorstep and there will be bitter battles over where they should be sited.

Some incineration, however, will probably be needed.

The amount of rubbish we create

is just too much for recycling to

take the place of dumping it in landfill sites.

But in the battle to reduce and recycle our waste we need our councils to take a lead.

Voters should not be expected

to accept incinerators, wherever

they may be sited, unless the councils that want to build them make a

serious commitment to recycle

50 per cent of our rubbish early in the lifetime of their new waste disposal plans.

Recycling half of our rubbish may

not be easy, but it is possible and 21st Century Sussex will expect nothing less.

Paid to play

Wayne Joseph has a dream job - playing computer games all day.

He is one of 80 members of staff at a Hove company who spend most of their waking hours testing the latest consoles and games before they go on sale to the public.

And they get paid for it - which is about as consoling for the rest of us

as winning the lottery and losing

your ticket on the way to pick up the cash.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.