Last weekend, I actually saw someone collecting vraic off a St Clement beach. I’m no legal eagle, so I’m not sure if it is still kosher to do that.

But he appeared jaunty enough as he forked his little harvest into the back of an elderly Japanese pick-up truck, and certainly encountered no impediment from any lurking local law enforcement.

I have no idea whether it was the ‘right’ sort of vraic, but he seemed pleased with his labour in the late autumn sunshine and confident of its worth. It put me in mind of childhood memories of the fleet of farmers’ lorries which would risk rusty bodywork and sand in the axle bearings to load up with the marine bounty, a tradition immortalised in the iconic photos in Temps Passé of horse-drawn carts waiting patiently at the water’s edge.

Making use of an abundant organic fertiliser, there for the taking, obviously made good local sense. Now, I know there are problems with putting too much seaweed on the soil – worms, for example, don’t like salt. But properly managed, it provided our forebears with valuable mulch to spread on the land.

The practice has now been overtaken by the equivalent of agricultural ‘convenience food’. – artificial fertilizer, chemically based, scientifically mixed, and delivered to your farm gate in easily spread sack-loads. But it isn’t cheap. In fact, costs are rising rapidly and it has a habit of providing ‘nutrients’ where none ran off before, namely in the streams and water courses. On an island like ours with its delicately balanced eco-structure, this inevitably leads to the foreshore – just where the seaweed, which is a natural absorber of pollution, breeds and flourishes.

And it isn’t just a problem for seaweed. If you’ve a resilient ear-drum, talk to the managers of the offshore shellfish industry about what is flowing into their shallow waters. Jersey has a shellfish industry worth more than £2 million a year, with an infrastructure and reputation built up over decades. It floats on perilous waters.
The point of my long preamble is to plant this question: are we really always as clever as we think we are when it comes to best value? Do we too frequently bankrupt Paul when we enrich Peter? Of course, there are balances to be struck, but who’s minding strategy behind the shop counter?

To those whose eyes light up like the Demie des Pas beacon whenever the reflection of a bank note drifts by, the renewed suggestion that Jersey should burn Guernsey’s soiled baby nappies, toxic medical rubbish and dangerous household detritus – the sort of things they can’t recycle and are too embarrassed to continue burying in the ground – might sound an attractive £12 million annual
bounty.

A chance, you might think, to claw back some of those slippery unbudgeted euros. And, without the sort of risk assessment any grown-up establishment would conduct as a matter of course, it has a definite appeal. For the municipal balance sheets, in one year it could wipe out the capital cost of ‘Ring-binder Park’ at a stroke.

But, examine the proposition a little closer and the gilt begins to tarnish. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, they say, and your unlikely Tennerfest menu would include the need to strengthen all the regulations associated with importing and handling hazardous waste, to say nothing of the prospect of burying extra ash – because you can bet your bottom ‘double’ our Sarnian neighbours wouldn’t relish the return of any powdery souvenirs as garden fertilizer.

We’ve also heard a little too much – particularly from the other side of the ditch – that the EfW plant has so much ‘excess capacity’. It may not be firing at full blast at the moment, but it is a state of the art machine, it needs TLC, even a breath of fresh air. Would you expect to flog your Ferrari at full tilt, day-in, day out till it broke? And the more the word goes out that there’s a convenient all-devouring monster capable of consuming everything – what chance your recycling policies then?

In this particular case, the Environmental Scrutiny Panel has already made its views clear about increased activity on the La Collette peninsular. But in the broader context, it warns that we risk endangering our precious marine environment generally if we neglect diligence in the face of the pursuit of profit.

Quality of life is too easily sacrificed if it cannot meet the price tag, with ‘bean counters’ supporting cost cutting schemes involving the removal of facilities and services which suit the bottom line of an account book. We’ve witnessed too many casualties of the ‘no profit, no service’ culture.

Yet reconciling hard business with emotion is a constant dilemma for anyone charged with responsibility for the public purse, as our newly shuffled politicians will surely experience. It is for them to determine what is ‘better value for the people’ [of the Island].

Such was the argument in favour of the recent decision to offer the States contract for processing scrap metal to outside tender. Obviously, there’s commercial fairness to be considered and indeed, there could very well be savings to be had from employing a successful outside contractor, backed up by economies of scale. But where’s the profit if it unwittingly forced an established local enterprise out of business, with the prospect of employees being thrown out of work to become a long term burden on the state?

Cost and value are so often cast together, but they can be uneasy bedfellows. For while the one often may determine the pursuit of the other, it may also very well hold the seeds of its destruction.