Careful with those coffee grinds when using your grounding machine

Herr Flick’s Environment Ministry is getting to grips with the collection of organic waste – except, obviously, for the sort that you should flush away – from households.

To this end, his people have justified their salaries by knotting their brows and producing this fabulous leaflet, telling us what to do with our “vegetable peels” (it’s either ‘peel’ or ‘peelings’, chaps) and best of all, our “grinded coffee”.

But never mind that. The real tragedy is that we live in a society so dumb that the Environment Ministry feels compelled to issue a specific explanation (with pictures) telling us what constitutes organic household waste.

This is probably the only lesson I remember from my post-kindergarten class at St Dorothy’s Primary School in Sliema, circa 1970: DEAD, ALIVE, NEVER ALIVE. Every day we would be given a list of various ‘things’ and told to categorise them into these three groups.

Stone: Never Alive
Cow: Alive
Beef: Dead
Tree: Alive
Paper: Dead

It shouldn’t have to be explained to anybody above the age of six that all organic waste by its very definition was once alive, but in Malta apparently it does.