The tip is rubbish

My view of a tip is a big hole in the mud, half full of rubbish, covered in bulldozers pushing piles of rotting prawn heads this way and that and smothered in wheeling, screeching seagulls. Cars backup to the pile, kids and Dad jump out and everyone grabs stuff from the boot and flings it onto the tip with a satisfying crash. Occasionally things are scavenged and the car returns home half full.

My local tip is not like that – it is an “environmental waste management facility” out near Homebush. Those expecting a hole in the ground are in for a rude shock – those people like me.

Instead, it looks more like a multi storey car park with rubbish trucks parked underneath. You drive up a ramp, park and then put recycling onto sorting benches on one side and fling the rubbish into a dirty great compactor on the other. The compactor is about 20 feet deep and easily large enough to take a semi trailer whole, and there are two of them end to end. I had much fun skidding bags of rubbish across the concrete floor and then listening to them crash into the bottom of the compactor.

Half a car load of junk cost $20 to tip. I recall going to a tip some years ago and it cost half that to dump a car. I don’t mean a car load of stuff – I mean a car that we had stripped and towed there on a trailer.

Rubbish is getting more expensive by the day.

One thing hasn’t changed – the place still stinks like a million rotting prawn heads.

As for it being an interesting day out, going to the tip these days is a rubbish experience. Where's the fun in not being able to pick through piles of other people's junk? Bloody enviro-nazi's.