07.02.07

Recycling

Posted in Feminism, Sunday Times Columns at 11:24 am by Sarah

Some points I couldn’t fit in this column that are relevant

- LOADS of stuff can be recycled but there is very low consumer awareness. One expert I read said that consumer ignorance is biggest barrier to recycling
- The new system is that the producer pays – industries therefore sign up to RePak, the group scheme to encourage recycling. Darrell Crowe told me that 50-55% of Green Bins are filled with newspapers – the only product where the producer does not pay for recycling…
- One great way to encourage more recycling would be to alter the frequency rates of collections for the different bins. So down here in Meath our black wheelie bin is collected every week and the green one every fortnight. That should be reversed. It would really force everyone to tranfer recyclable material from the black one to the green one.

Anyway (the unedited version….)

My faith has been shaken in recent weeks. True, I was a forced convert but the Miracle of the Composting Bin proved to be my epiphany. For most of my adult life I lived in sin in apartment blocks. There we gaily threw all rubbish into one tiny kitchen bin and flung the whole lot at regular intervals into communal skips in the basement. Recycling simply didn’t feature within the constraints of a 4 x 4 kitchenette and a non-discriminating receptacle in the bowels of the building.

Then we moved to the commonly derided one-off house in the country where privatised rubbish collection forced a change of strategy. The system required that special branded bags be purchased at €3.50 each and left for collection. Economy demanded that Something Be Done. I bought a composting bin for €35 and enforced a new regime. Tea bags, peelings and egg shells were all dumped in the composter along with cardboard boxes and old flowers. The results are amazing. We’ve had that bin for over two years and whether it is half full or half empty I can’t say, but the waste never reaches the top.

My conversion came just in time as the refuse company changed to fixed price wheelie bins thus removing the element of coercion. Fortunately, having witnessed the wonder of composting, I was convinced that recycling was the virtuous path. Glass, paper, tins, tetra paks, plastic bottles and even the plastic cartons you get with mushrooms : all go in the green bin. The black one just gets the nappies and cooked food scraps. I know there
are saints who use terry cloth nappies, but there are some places I’m not willing to go. Nevertheless, I still feel pretty smug about saving the world and evangelise when I can to heathens. And there are plenty of them. An ad running in the broadsheets last week claimed that only 10% of tetra paks in Ireland are recycled.

There were one or two dissenting voices which I wilfully ignored. The Belfast based mother-in-law was suspicious. She had diligently sorted her glass at the bottle bank one day only to witness each colour coded skip being emptied into the same container. This chink in her faith proved fatal and she began asking questions about the destination of the allegedly recyclable material. I dismissed this public expression of doubt until I began reading articles claiming that India and China have become dumping grounds for western waste. China alone take 70% of the world’s “e-waste” : electronic goods. In the UK, councils who collect mixed waste don’t have the proper facilities to separate the paper from the plastics. Recycling companies reject the material and it ends up in the Far East where migrant workers pick over it in toxic conditions for low wages.

The mother-in-law’s suspicions about the mixed up glass were supported by an interview in this paper two weeks ago with Nigel Keenlyside, of Berryman, Britain’s biggest glass recyclers. He said that once clear glass has been smashed and mixed with coloured glass and other materials and waste, it cannot be used to make new bottles and jars and is commonly used as road aggregate or sent for landfill.

Last month’s Economist observed that the UK is actually struggling with a mountain of green glass. It is the largest importer of wine in the world, bringing in more than 1 billion litres every year, much of it in green glass bottles. But with only a tiny wine industry of its own, there is little demand for the resulting glass. Some of the surplus glass gets what they call “down-cycled” into things like sand for filtration systems. But analysts admit that the energy savings appear to be “marginal or even disadvantageous”.

We ape everything else English, so why not their fake recycling?
Darrell Crowe at Repak, the organisation responsible for helping industries meet their producer responsibilities to dispose of waste packaging helpfully pointed out to me that Ireland is not England. He says that Ireland’s facilities to separate waste are far superior to Britain’s. The first trick of recycling is to have non-contaminated waste and we have high-tech mechanical systems which achieve this.

Repak try to ensure that material is actually recycled by only paying subsidies on production of hard evidence. For example, Rehab get paid for every ton of glass recycled but only on production of a delivery docket to the Quinn Glass company in Fermanagh. That’s Quinn as in Sean Quinn and it did occur to me that between quarries and cement factories, it’s possible that not all the glass ends up as glass. Still, at least it’s not landfill, either here or in China.

So what about China? Repak estimate that 12% of our waste is exported there and we have no basis for assuming that this must be a bad thing. Why would companies in China buy the waste in the first place if it simply goes to landfill? Pieter van Buekering made a similar point in the Economist “as soon as somebody is paying for the material, you bet it will be recycled.” That argument does make sense. There are plenty of illegal operations in those countries but the basis of the industry has to be that a re-saleable product is shipped back to the West.

Crowe did take the wind out of my sails on one point. I had proudly bragged of my devotion to recycling everything possible so he challenged me to a test. Glass jars and olive oil bottles? Yes. Detergent bottles? Yes. What about toilet roll holders he enquired? Em, sometimes. Shampoo bottles? Eh…… Take-out containers? Well the plastic ones I wash and keep but not the foil ones. Apparently they should go in the green bin too. Toothpaste tubes? Toothpaste tubes? Never occurred to me! Confession concluded, Fr. Crowe pronounced penance and I guiltily inspected my bins for other environmental crimes.
As smart as I thought it was it turns out I’m only a beginner. Composting vegetable peelings is kid stuff. Looks like it’s pretty easy to mutter about China while we fling far too much of our own waste into the dreaded black wheelie bin.

Still, some of the grumblers do have a point. Author William McDonagh claims that the fundamental flaw in recycling is allowing the refuse industry to be in charge of it. Look at it this way: we keep focusing on how to deal with what we throw out. An entire industry has now developed based entirely on people continuing to supply it with a steady stream of waste material. Just like incinerators, recyclers are hungry beasts who must be sated and whose existence simply enables us to keep consuming and keep throwing out.

McDonagh and others argue that the focus should shift from disposal to re-use. Alternative functions for everything should be designed into the manufacturing process. As long as there is money to be made in disposal then we’ll never learn to stop creating the waste in the first place.

Permalink