Rubbish!

I've been watching the legal battle over land use at Dale Farm with great interest. Dale Farm is the largest Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller site in the UK, and people have been living there since the 60's. Tensions between the locals and the travellers who live on both the fully legal and the planning authority breaching sides of the site have been running high for many years, but are now reaching new heights as actual evictions loom. 

Local objections to the Dale Farm and to the travellers themselves vary, however they tend to fall into one of two camps - a sense that planning laws must be applied equally (even though the local authority has failed to provide enough sites) and the site is 'unfair' and that travellers 'always' leave rubbish behind them whenever the move on from a camp, or that sites are untidy.

This second objection got me thinking - why do many travellers fail to clean up sites adequately when they move on - even though they may well need to return to them the following year? The received wisdom is that because much of it is scrap and rubbish from building work which is classed as commercial waste, the local authorities will charge to collect it and the traveller's don't want to pay. Many settled businesses don't want to pay either and fly tipping is a huge problem across the UK and worldwide - it's just that when travellers do it everyone can see where to point the finger.

I don't think it's a purely financially driven phenomenon though - I think there's a deeper reason. I've been thinking about waste and reuse for a long time and the how's and why's of our behaviour - I founded http://www.re-present.com/projects/we-all-reuse.

Until the second world war, many of us threw very little away. The only thing that we put in dustbins was dust, or ashes from our fires and stoves - the rest of our waste was fed to pigs, composted, reused, redistributed or buried in our back gardens. We were careful about what we acquired - and deliberately chose things that would last a long time.

When we found that things were worn out, broken or damaged, we mended them ourselves, or waited till someone came round to buy or mend them. For a long time, many of these people were Romanies - or as we we called them Tinkers ( this is now a slightly derogatory term, I don't recommend you use it). Putting in a new bottom on a cooking pot, mending leather goods and sharpening or re-handling knives all could be done with limited kit and a lot of skill and practice.

Other travellers lived in woodland or on farms, making and working on the land and moving seasonally to where the work or resources were best. Common to all travellers is the need to move on and to travel light. When 'rubbish' was either biodegrable or considered a valuable resource, leaving it behind was not a problem. Wood, leather, paper and most metals will eventually decay and moulder - leaving very little trace. Now we have such an abundant culture of stuff, and so much of our rubbish doesn't rot it's a different matter.

In some parts of India it's common to see cow's browsing through roadside tips - nosing through the plastic, cartons, tins and other rubbish to find edibles, and no one questions the health issues for the cows and for those who drink the milk - because, I believe, in their minds, the middens are those of a few generations back - where the cows would have been feeding on vegetable scraps and not much more. Sadly these days it's a different matter.

Today, most of us who live in houses don't question the amount we throw away and that ends up in landfill - partly because it's taken away by our local authorities, but mostly in my view because ALL OF US are still in the mindset that it's OK to throw away - because we still subscribe to the idea that everything will eventually rot - which is not the case.

So my argument here is this - that rather than simply criticising the Traveller's for leaving rubbish behind we should be looking at the way we dispose of our rubbish, and what we buy in the first place. So much domestic rubbish is packaging and cheap shoddy goods that are not designed to last (It is possible to do cheap and long lived, we've just fallen out of the habit)

Both us settled folk and the travellers themselves should look with pride to their resourceful make do and mend past, and learn from it. Not to romanticise a hard life on the road or to wish today's travellers out of their plush caravans or houses, but to add it to the parts of their past they themselves still treasure, like working in farming or construction, breeding, working and racing horses, storytelling and legendary music-filled get togethers.

As we head for harder economic times ahead, we may well be glad of the return of the menders, the rag and bone merchants, and skilled travelling workmen and labourers who can do the job for less because they don't have the overheads of a house or depot.

Oh, and I hope the evicted travellers find new pitches soon, and the local authority stops spending more on legal fees than on the services and pitches that they need, and should have had, long ago.

• Dale Farm travellers lose eviction appeal at High Court (mirror.co.uk)
• Dale Farm 'Will Never Be Green Fields' (news.sky.com)

The picture shows a horse drawn rubbish cart in use by a local authority in France.