...or maybe we should call it the municipal recycling shame
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
My observations are leading me to believe that in a great many cases it is all but a sham because general waste trucks often collect also the recyclables from clearly marked bins and add it to their contents, destined for the landfill, and also the recycling trucks have been seen, rather regularly, dumping their content at landfill sites.
While we, as consumers, whether that be households or businesses, are trying to do our part the municipalities and their contractors, where contractors are being used, just put the stuff with the general waste that ends up in landfill.
This is not how it is supposed to work and neither, but that is not really the story here, should our recyclables go into containers to be shipped to places such as Mexico, many of which have no recycling infrastructure, and, as in the cases recorded in Mexico, being carted from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast where the contents then was literally tipped into the sea. Is it any wonder we have the large plastic garbage patches in the oceans?
The problem the industrialized nations are currently faced with concerning waste for recycling is that many developing nations such as China, Vietnam, India and others have shut their ports to imports of our waste for reprocessing. And, as most of those nations, the industrialized developed ones, are not prepared to do the dirty work in their own countries the stuff either gets shipped to other countries where it is just dumped, often into the sea.
When it comes to plastic recyclables, be it bottles or others, we are, whether this is the UK or any other country, wasting a valuable resource by sending the stuff to somewhere to be reprocessed, or destroyed (dumped) rather than having our own national facilities where such materials are reprocessed back into polymers for the plastics industry.
When it comes to glass, even when collected by recycling trucks and, actually, sent to recycling it is not recycling but downcycling because no one can tell me that from the mixed glass – because nowadays all the stuff that we may have separated by color is tossed into one vat – new bottles or jars or whatever are being made. The truth is that this glass gets ground down to make road aggregate. In other words it is being made into almost nothing more than sand.
While, as indicated above, aside from the fact that we should, actually, get rid of plastic bottles and other plastic packaging as much as possible, plastic waste should be recycled at home and unbroken glass bottles and even jars should be returned to whence the came to be sterilized and then reused. Only glass which has been broken should ever go to recycling and, then again, the recycling should be done properly and at home. With “at home” is meant in the home country and not in our individual homes, obviously.
When it comes to drinks bottles, glass ones, be it lemonade, beer, wine, or whatever else, they should come, to give a financial incentive for the bottles to go back into the reuse stream, with a small deposit that is refundable upon return, the way things once were. It is not rocket science, even though the governments, in the UK especially, try to pretend. It does not need to have pilot projects and studies as to whether it would work. We had this system, and many other countries did too, and it worked and works. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
Alas in the UK and the USA everything is geared towards profit for some, even in this field, and hence they want the recyclable for nothing and then try to sell the stuff to reprocessors. If, however, there is not enough money to be made from the sale of the “raw material” then they rather have it go into landfill than for recycling. This way the demand from the reprocessors increases as then will the price. We can safely file that under greenwash than actual concern for reducing and recycling waste.
© 2021
