by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Over fifty percent of all the waste produced in Britain can be recycled but very little in fact is.
The problem here is, I would suggest, more than one single one and it is more than one single factor that causes this recycling not to take place.
One of the greatest problems is people's apathy, regardless of what they say and how much they claim that they want to recycles, etc.
Then there is also the fact that we should be looking at pre-cycling before recycling and in all honesty also at upcycling well before recycling.
What do I mean with “pre-cycling”? Pre-cycling in this context is the fact of not even taking the packaging home, for instance, as can be done in many places on the European mainland, for instance. Overpackaging can be left at the store, for them to get rid off, at no cost to the consumer and this has made a lot of manufacturers rethink the way they package things. Let's face it; most of the waste that we generate is packaging, and often packaging that is unnecessary.
Another factor, and this has more impact than anything, is that many of the local authorities have the wrong attitude – and that aside from wishing to fine people who do not recycle properly. More often than not the recyclables are seen – and in a way that is fine – as commodities that need to be sold to the highest bidder instead of the councils investing in their own facilities where those materials are reworked themselves and value being added too it, again.
What we need is council facilities and those by contractors that convert the recyclables here and now into the new products rather than shipping the stuff as plastic bottles, squashed aluminum and steel cans and such, to places such as China where they may – or may not – be recycled. Some waste in fact is simply dumped into holes in the ground over there, so we understand.
Recycling as an industry proper must be brought back “in house” in the same way as we need to bring manufacturing back into our countries.
While it is understandable that we want cheap goods it often also means shoddy and in addition to that they are not cheap if we factor in the transportation costs, especially the environmental ones, into the products.
As far as recycling is concerned serious mistakes are being done in that waste is seen as a resource that must be shipped to some other place in order to be made into new products, and often those products only have a small amount of recycled contents as, for instance, there is no possibility to have 100% post-consumer recycled plastic goods. Most, if not indeed, all products that state “made from recycled plastic” are but made with recycled plastic and new polymers.
Our main aim must be to reduce and then to reuse and upcycle before we even touch the stuff as a resource to be broken down and rebuilt. But the latter is always the first thing that people and authorities seem to look at; recycling into new products. That is the complete wrong approach in way too many cases.
Glass bottles and glass jars are, for instance, one example here. Why should they end up in bins for recycling, go to the council depots and from there to recycling facilities where they get crushed and ground down and then be made again into bottles.
There was a time when we used to have deposit on bottles, soda bottles, beer bottles, the lot, and those bottles would go back to the bottling plants to be cleaned and then refilled. The same could be done with glass jars. Never should a bottle or jar be broken up and ground down in order to be remelted into glass with the exception when it is broken.
In addition to that we must reduce packaging and that must be done at the manufacturers' source.
Upcycling is the other logical answer for many products, including tin cans of the food tin can variety and much can be made from them that the upcyling craftsman or -woman (or even child) can make into resalable goods that people would want to buy. This would keep tons of those things out of the waste stream.
I have been doing it since childhood but then again, it was one of those things that we did. Tins cans, wire, and other things were the raw materials from which we made the goods for sale on markets and in door-to-door trading.
To this day I look at every item of waste with a view of “what can this be made into”. Often today no longer in order to make a lot of them for sale but in order to write about this as ideas for others to take up.
Many people go out and buy – for good money – glass storage jars for the kitchen, for instance, when they get them free (sort of) in fact when they buy goods in glass jars. But, instead of reusing those that they pay for, really, when they buy goods in glass jars, they send those to the recycling plant and go and pay good money for storage jars. That does not compute; at least not in my book.
If we all would look at such ways of reducing the waste we would really starve the bins, even the recycling ones, and we would benefit our own pocketbook as well.
© 2009
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