Load Of Old Rubbish

by Marc Shoffman - Thursday 30th August 2007


With Big Brother ending a new Channel 4 reality show is on the horizon, and in truth it is absolute rubbish.

Dumped follows 11 people living on a landfill for three weeks without any shelter or electricity and only other people's garbage to make use of. But this is no problem for Jason Blair, an Orthodox Jew, who managed to make his own bed, shower and even keep Shabbat.

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The 36-year-old joined the other participants at the Beddington Lane landfill in South Croydon for three weeks in June. The show aims to highlight the mountain of waste material thrown away needlessly in Britain.

"It reeked," he told TJ. "Everyday there was a different smell. If it was sunny things would ferment amore and there was another smell in the rain."

He soon discovered that everything thrown away had a use, "Sheet metal, bits of wood, cable, glass, piping, paint everything had a use, if you couldn't think of a use, you just weren't thinking hard enough. I built a working solar shower out of rubbish. All it takes is a bit of ingenuity and elbow grease.
"We made a shelter out of timber and made a steel cooker out of scrap metal."

To keep Shabbat he would keep food burning on the fire on Friday and Saturday and would not allow himself to be filmed. He also took a prayer book and tefillin onto the site.

He said: "I truly believe that as Jews, we have the responsibility to lead by example. We introduced social responsibility into the world so we should use it.

"We have a magical black portal outside our homes, and anything we put in it, regardless of weight, usefulness or toxicity, is magically transported away, never to be seen again But it is not going that far. Everyone lives within one mile of an old, or current landfill. That is too close for comfort."

Inspired by the programme, Blair has now moved to a smaller house in Edgware with his wife and they have abandoned plans to go on Safari, instead opting for a canal boat trip in the UK.

He said: "We recycle, use green products, buy things off internet auction sites rather than brand new items. When we are done, everything goes to the car boot sales or the charity shops."

But he warned, "The biggest problem we all face is that 2 tonnes is the sustainable limit for carbon per person per year, the government uses 5.5 tonnes on your behalf, which means you are already 3.5 tonnes over your limit. It does rather make you feel like your efforts are a little wasted."

Meanwhile, as Big Brother draws to a close this Friday , two Jewish contestants are in the running for the £100,000 prize. After surviving three months in the house, the latest odds put both Ziggy Lichman and Carole Vincent at 66/1 to be crowned king or queen of the eighth series of the reality show.

- Dumped starts on Channel 4 on Sunday at 9pm.

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