Where's Wall-E when you need him?

Where's Wall-E When You Need Him?

Did you hear the one about the mountain at the end of a street in Kent that’s forty feet tall, 500 feet long and made up of twenty tonnes of stinking waste?

There’s no punch line. It’s a real thing. Ugh. 

Cornwall Drive in St Paul’s Cray. Sounds like a lovely place, doesn’t it? And you’d be right, except for the rat-infested monument to mankind’s wasteful attitude that looms over these poor people’s homes night and day. According to this news article, an upturned digger lies abandoned, as if it fainted at the sight and just decided to surrender entirely. We don’t blame it to be honest; you’d need a fleet of diggers just to make a dent. 

Oh, and did we mention that it keeps setting on fire? As if the thing didn’t already stink enough and pose a huge threat to the health – not to mention wellbeing – of its neighbours, toxic fumes keep floating down into their homes!

Despite not being able to open their windows without gagging, and even though residents have been complaining about it for years, the massive mound of old newspapers, rancid milk cartons, mouldy food, soggy clothes and, we can only assume, used cat litter and all the things that come with it, nothing is being done to alleviate the situation. The MPs don’t want to know and the council are turning a blind eye, although they’ll have to turn it pretty flipping far to stop seeing this behemoth of putrefying garbage.

And those fires we mentioned? There have been seventeen fire brigade callouts to the site in the last year alone. Seriously, what on earth is going on? Actually, we can tell you: a rubbish disposal company called Waste4Fuel are held accountable, and they’re constantly back and forth between the High Court, arguing with the Environment Agency over whose job it is to sort it all out. Chances are that they’ll soon have to face up to the fact that they have a heck of a lot of rubbish to get of rid of, but the question is, where will it go?

We can only hope that residents of nearby Bickley don’t wake up one morning to find that a twenty-tonne pile of rubbish has magically appeared at the end of their road, as a fleet of diggers swiftly disappears over the horizon.