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The Study

Here is a selection of my writings, starting with a very, very short story.

The Mousetrap

Counting the costs of a cleaner world

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The Mousetrap

The house was in darkness. He stepped out onto the landing. His ears strained to the noises of the night. Outside the wind was rattling the trees, but the sound was drowned by the voices of his conscience. The boards had not creaked as expected under his weight. The clock echoed down the hall, mimicking his heartbeat. He reached the bottom of the stairs.

Voices urged him on. The chill of the linoleum shivered up his spine, causing him to catch his breath. Droplets of sweat dripped from his jowls. He wished he had not forgotten his slippers in his anxiety to come down without being heard. He lifted his hand from the banister, breathing heavily, and like a phantom crossed the hallway. A shudder followed each step, half fear half cold. The heating had been off since May, but summer had "missed the train", as the doctor had said. "Cover yourself, Mr Beckenbaum. There's more of you to catch cold than the rest of us."

He reached the door. He knew it. Here was the sound he recognized. He had at first thought it was just his belly. The torments of his mind could not have been endowed with such vividness. It was, they later said, an excuse for suicide. His hand rested on the handle. A pause. The voices on his shoulders rose to a murmur above the throbbing of his pulse. Slowly the door opened and all was silence: moonlight through the blinds striped across the tiles, as if to bar the way. The angel fluttered back onto his shoulder, whispering, whispering.

He turned, holding his fingers around the door against a draught, and eased it shut.

Moving like a ghost under the directions of the tormentor on his left shoulder, he slid his feet along the floor to avoid stepping into the dog's bowl, arms out for balance. A hand on the table, on the chair, he reached the part of the room that was in shadow. He swallowed back the saliva collecting behind his teeth. The noise in his ears had doubled: a battle of wits and neither his own. The rush of his pulse now added itself to the murmuring of his two passengers, and the noise of the feast behind the metal door. He heaved his arm up to the handle, gripped, and tugged.

Waves of light flooded out, lapped around his feet, spilled over the tables and chairs, and dripped from the taps. His mouth hung open at the banquet that lay before him.

Floorboards creaked somewhere overhead. A gob of saliva dripped from his lip. He stood motionless in the light from the refrigerator. The murmuring had risen to a scream. His pulse was now a torrent rushing through his ears, his mind.

The nurse found Mr Beckenbaum, like a rat, with the cheese in his mouth. The neighbours talked, the press reported. The details differed, though the diagnosis did not. The title: Cholesterol Clot. When the choice was between diet and destruction, Mr Beckenbaum had turned his back on the one, and salvation with it, only to be caught in the end by a vulgar piece of mousetrap.

Counting the costs of a cleaner world

Recycling waste is not always the best way ahead either for the environment or for the economy, reports Roy Ecott* in Zurich

Recycling, an activity once restricted to the conscientious minority, has become "flavour of the decade". During the past ten years the number of towns and cities in the US with recycling schemes has swelled from 140 to more than 2,700.

But a few bold thinkers at universities on both sides of the Atlantic now suggest that recycling may not benefit the environment as much as many believe, and is certainly not as economically viable as it might seem.

As a viable economic activity recycling is a complicated business. On the whole, people are aware of how rubbish is collected and sorted, but they forget about the marketing of the end product. Yet that is often the key question.

As Dr Eric Johnson of Mobil Plastics Europe said: "There is a world of difference between recycling industrial waste and post-consumer waste - in terms of cleanliness and contamination, as well as cost."

Although people are generally aware of what kinds of waste are re-usable, they do not always know the full story. For example, it is effective to melt down glass and aluminium to be used again, but with glass a great deal of energy is used in the process.

With aluminium there is an energy saving of 95 per cent compared with that used in making new metal. But the manufacturers say that "even if the many billions of aluminium cans produced in Europe each year were to be collected, that would still be just the tip of the iceberg".

Also, householders who are happy enough to save cans often forget to hand in bigger items such as frying pans and saucepans when they reach the end of their useful life.

Although certainly useful, the re-smelting of aluminium does not guarantee financial success. Refonda, Switzerland's only recycling plant for that purpose, was forced to close this year for economic reasons. The metal collected now has to be exported to Germany for reprocessing.

Paper is another popular item for recycling. But the process is not straightforward. The best-quality wood fibres can only be recycled up to six times, because the cellulose breaks down and the fibres become too short to use, or are lost in the process.

"Recycled paper is weaker than fresh virgin paper," said Erkki Peippo from the company Finnboard. "So more of it has to be used to fulfil the same functions. This means a cardboard box made from recycled pulp would have to be up to 50 per cent heavier than one made with virgin fibres if it is to be as strong."

Not only is recycled paper low in strength, it is low in hygiene too, with high proportions of heavy metals and biological organisms that require strong biocides to kill them.

Forests are not threatened by papermaking. Wood pulp for paper is farmed in the softwood forests of the northern hemisphere in a similar way to cereal crops.

An increasing number of experts are convinced that refuse-derived fuel is the best way to dispose of household rubbish. Plastics are a good example, as they are derived from petroleum, and can be incinerated as a concentrated form of petroleum energy.

"Owing to the various molecular structures of different plastics, they should ideally be recycled individually if they are to be re-used their intended applications," said Johnson, and that is a tricky and expensive business.

Some companies have tried blending plastics to make innocuous products such as road cones or park benches; but there is a limit to the number of road cones and park benches people want.

For the moment the EC still considers incineration as a useful way of disposing of refuse. Countries such as Denmark, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain have started establishing incineration plants to burn household refuse to ensure some form of energy recovery, to re-use the heat directly or to power electricity-generating turbines.

More and more governments are legislating to encourage recycling. But economic considerations are not taken sufficiently into account. Companies complain that they are not being given enough time to find out what is feasible or necessary, and what is simply a waste of time.

Even for those products that can be easily and economically collected and recycled, a market for the final product must exist before recycling becomes worthwhile, otherwise rubbish is being turned at great expense into new rubbish which ultimately has to be dumped.

In Germany the strictness of the packaging ordinance has given rise to instances of cargoes of plastics being shipped abroad, because there was no money to be made from it. German rubbish has turned up in uncontrolled landfill sites in Portugal and as far away as Sough Africa.

Professor David Pearce from the centre for social and economic research on the global environment at University College in London, an advocate of the principle that the polluter must pay, said: "Politicians are so active against packaging waste on merely opportunistic grounds. They get away with it because householders can identify with the issue. Politicians can act without appearing to impose a great cost on the electorate, whereas moves to control global warming would hit voters in a much more noticeable way.

The European, September 1992
(*pseudonym used for professional reasons)

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