I live in an area where the sandstone quarries are less than a mile away. Three ha'pence was the price for a cut stone block, 1' x 1' x 2'...the three quarries were still open when my father was a boy. All around us there are sandstone houses and buildings, but slates had to come from Ballachuilish or from Wales. Good clay nearby and they're still using it to make bricks....right enough they made a tidy profit from the 3' seam of coal that they'd to dig out to get to the clay
You're right though, all those quarries are gone, and the last farm in the village is being built upon right now. No space left. Even the old Victorian gasworks site has become flats and an estate of eighty more houses.
Thing is though, all the masons who carved that stone, they died young. They died of lung disease caused by the stone dust, like the men who built Edinburgh's New Town. Silicosis is a hellish way to die.
Now we know they need protective clothing and decent machinery and dust extractors, but that all costs money....but no one dies from the dust of cutting building stone, not here. Too expensive, too uneconomical, etc., so now we import cut sandstone slabs from India....where I suspect poor men still die young from silicosis
I think we are becoming very aware of the damage we cause by the products we souce, buy and use and dispose of.
Apparently the biggest issue to re-cycling is the mixed media. Cardboard coated with plastics, metal foil bonded to plastic and card and paper. Endless clingfilm and single use polythene bags.
Already though paper bags are making a come back in the supermarkets
and almost everyone brings at least some of their own shopping bags when they shop.
We don't buy butcher meat wrapped in greaseproof paper anymore though, and we don't visit the butcher's shop and queue up beside hanging carcases slowly dripping the odd spot of blood onto sawdust covered floors. That was pretty normal in my childhood. None of this not knowing where meat came from. It came from a dead animal, and the butchers worked in the shop with the door open and no heating on, all year round. Red raw swollen hands they all had. Layered up in clothes and scarves in Winter, and the back door open to create a through going breeze to keep things cold in Summer. The meat was always good though, and nothing went to waste, even the bones went into the stock pots and were then given to the dogs.
Health and Safety would have a field day with all that now.
Fruit and veg comes on plastic trays inside sealed poly bags or in those hellish wee plastic nets, and very little of it's recycleable. We still have a local fruitmonger though, and you get to pick what you want from the big boxes there. It's a lot more expensive than the supermarkets however.
I wonder how well the recycling of bottles, jars and cans will go ? It's another step along the road I think
I am very glad that in general people really are becoming aware of the issues. Whether that will really change things or not, well, that's a wait and see, isn't it ?
M
