RECYCLING OR RE-CONNING?
On the flight back from Italy, British Airways gave us a sandwich. Among the paraphernalia that accompanies airline food was a transparent pouch labelled ‘Waste Bag – open here’. Inside was a thin, A4 sized plastic bag with a couple of holes for handles. Into that we put the multiple plastic wrappings, cardboard tray, stirrers, sugar you don’t take, milk you don’t like, plastic tumbler, paper cup, cutlery, and the corner of the sandwich that was a bit dry. Altogether, I am sure the weight of the waste from the sandwich pack was more than the food I consumed. But of course the first item into this waste bag was – the small bag it came in! The sole purpose of that 0.16 gram of cellophane was to contain a rubbish bag. Surely it is better to reduce the packaging than to provide a little bag to contain it all?
I thought of all this because my local council has decided that from this month just about all household rubbish will be recycled. Plastic goes into a grey container and disappears once a fortnight. As does the green bag of garden waste. Bottles, paper, cans, printer cartridges, mobile phones, batteries, textiles go into a green box - weekly. And food waste goes into its own small container in the kitchen before being transferred into a larger one outside and also disappears every week.
I don’t mind being a waste librarian, carefully sorting my rubbish into categories, and washing and relining the food waste bin. If it saves resources it is time well spent. But will this carefully sorted material really be recycled? The recession has brought to an end much of the trade in second-hand glass, paper, steel and aluminium that used to cover the cost of three lorries with binmen – sorry, recycling operatives – visiting every street every week.
Instead of this material being sold for re-use a lot of it is now being stored in warehouses waiting for the time when the recession ends and reignites the recycling market – assuming the material has not made enough methane to ignite itself. The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has even admitted dumping 30,000 tonnes of recycling in landfill.
I am happy to do my bit and give the space and cleaning time to five bins rather than one. I just wish I was more certain that the people doing the next stage were as diligent. And is it too much to hope that if recycling works council tax will come down?
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