Recovered cans and bottles in my blue bin
Whenever I'm out doing this kind of feel good public service a passer by always seems to say "it's an endless task, isn't it?" and indeed it is. Not only do the forces of entropy mean that any ordered state requires a constant input of energy to keep it that way but also, in common with many domestic tasks, there are usually more people prepared to create a mess than there are to clear it up. Indeed, since there are many more ways to create a messy environment than a tidy one (in a tidy one there's only one way in which the bottles and cans aren't there but in a messy one there are literally* countless ways to arrange them) it's much easier to be successfully messy than successfully tidy.
But, you might ask, apart from this idle philosophical coupling of litter and entropy, what's the point of this post and why's it got this title? Well, to put it simply I'm having a dig, a metaphorical dig. A few years back some local election candidates for the Green Party put a picture on the back of their election leaflet showing them doing exactly what I'd been doing, picking up litter. Now I'm sure that they both like to consider themselves as something other than your standard attention seeking politicians but what got my goat at the time was the headline that went with it "Job Done".
* I pondered whether to say literally or not here but, considering all the possible ways in which the cans and bottles could be arranged and swapped about I reckon that you wouldn't actually ever have time to count them all so literally countless it is.
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