| Product: |
Waste disposal |
| Date: |
23.06.01 (187 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: See review
Disadvantages: See review
There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that recycling should be a fundamental part of modern day life. The world’s resources are fundamentally finite, and if we don’t get smarter at making things last longer, or being able to continually re-use things, we are setting up future generations for disaster. The problem is – it’s not as simple as that.
In terms of household goods the recycling issue is split in two ways:
1. We need to identify ways of efficiently recycling all the household waste that we produce.
2. We need to ensure that more and more of the products that we buy come from biodegradable or recycled sources.
Recycling Household Waste
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A significant percentage of household waste could be recycled. Cans, glass bottles, paper, and cardboard are all easily recycled. Nonetheless, very few households go to the trouble of recycling any of their waste – but why?
Financial Motivation
In pure mercenary terms there is no financial incentive for householders to recycle. Years ago, deposits were offered for the return of glass bottles - not any more. Supermarkets offered a penny back if you brought your own carrier bags – not any more. Major businesses find recycling time-consuming and costly, so they simply cannot be bothered to encourage consumers to recycle their waste. Your council tax charges for refuse collection are fixed – if you take advantage of any recycling facilities offered by your local council you don’t get any rebate, you pay the same as everyone else. Whilst it may be a sad indictment on today’s society, the fact of the matter is there is simply no financial reward for consumers to recycle their waste.
Impracticality
The average household may find recycling waste to be a very impractical exercise. Given that recyclable waste may fall into at least five different categories, the frequency
of council refuse collections would mean that we might have to store the waste for up to a week. This means arranging individual containers, and continually segregating the waste every time we go to throw it away. Most households that do recycle would make use of the recycle centres provided by many major supermarkets, but not everybody could do this. Anyone who doesn’t drive would automatically be unable to use these facilities, as nobody could be expected to carry refuse around on public transport (and I’m not sure the transport companies would be too keen either). In short, recycling is not made easy for the consumer – throwing everything away, once a week, in a single bag or bin is the much easier option.
Laziness
Money and practicality aside, recycling is a relatively committed exercise. It can be very difficult to condition yourself to segregate all your waste all of the time – you only have to have a lazy day and your efforts can be wasted. Furthermore, the requirement to identify whether a product is recyclable can be a nuisance – for example, not all drinks cans are made from a recyclable material. As very few local authorities provide households with separate containers for recyclable waste, it is easy to understand why so few people actually recycle anything.
Of course, recycling household waste doesn’t just have to mean sorting your rubbish into different boxes – there are lots of ways of reducing the amount of household waste that needs to be disposed of:
Get a compost heap – rather than throwing away organic matter, you can easily compost the waste in your garden - recycling doesn’t come any more naturally than that.
Donate to charity – unwanted (but usable) goods will be gladly received by charity shops. Just because you have outgrown clothes or no longer use something, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other people who can’t mak
e use.
Sell things on – boot fairs, garage sales, Internet auctions – there are loads of ways of selling goods second-hand when otherwise you might throw them away.
One thing that has never ceased to amaze me is how some people will transport an old mattress somewhere and then dump it by the side of the road. How could it take more time to take it to the refuse tip than it did to where they dumped it? It’s like a reverse laziness – they’ll dump it by a railway track or in a country lane but not in a skip on a designated site.
Reducing Household Waste
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Prevention, as they say, is better than cure. Rather than focus on what we are all doing with our rubbish, perhaps we should focus on the rubbish we are creating? I suspect that very few people reading this opinion could honestly say that recyclable packaging is a key factor in their buying decisions. Isn’t this where we are going wrong? As consumers, what we buy dictates what we get sold. There really is no point lobbying the supermarkets to stock one thing and not another – the only way to vote is with your purse or wallet. It can be done – look at the way cosmetics are now strictly labelled Not Tested On Animals – consumer demand forced the stores to stop stocking products that had been tested on animals. Besides which, supermarkets have an argument for everything. When asked why they don’t use paper bags for their fruit it’s because their cashiers cannot recognise the items at the till unless they are in a clear plastic bag.
The problem is, products are packaged with two priorities – ease of use and attractiveness. If bottles need to be shrink wrapped in plastic to make them sexy then so be it – who cares if the plastic can’t be recycled and that the information could just as easily have been attached via a paper label? It never ceases to amaze me how wasteful p
ackaging is on just about everything these days – which wouldn’t be such a problem if everything was biodegradable. I don’t believe that there is enough pressure on manufacturers to be economical in the way that they sell their products. The idea of buying refills rather than new bottles was something that was introduced to washing liquids a few years ago. It’s not something that seems to have caught on with many other things – but why not?
The fact of the matter is, we live in a throw away society. Things aren’t built to last these days – they’re built to survive the current fashion trends. Everyone has to have everything – the only way to achieve this is through mass-produced goods with cheap (non bio-degradable) ingredients. Look at the explosion in electrical goods – you can get microwaves for £49.99 nowadays. The fact that they will probably expire in 6 months, and then be left to rot in a landfill site for about 60 years appears to go unnoticed. The whole system is geared up to this short life span – it’s cheaper to buy a new kettle than get the old one fixed. And it’s like this because everything we own has become a fashion statement, rather than a functional item.
Don’t get me wrong – I like nice things – but I believe you should have to pay for them. I’d rather spend £300 on a microwave oven and know that it will last ten years or more, than spend £50 and say goodbye to it before Christmas. Regardless of what you may be led to believe cheap is NOT good. Cheap probably means that every available cost was cut – which invariably means at the expense of the environment. When it comes down to it, the key to recycling is not what you do with the rubbish, but what you buy that makes all the rubbish.
Suggestions for the Future
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1. More support from local authorities – more frequent refuse collect
ions for recycled goods, with better provision of wheeled bins or other containers in which to store each type of product.
2. Financial incentives from manufacturers – the old 20p deposit on a glass bottle idea. You may not be bothered about the odd 20p but I’m sure there are loads of kids who will collect them from you to boost their pocket money.
3. Tighter regulation on unsolicited mail – how much junk mail do you get each week? How much of it was of any real benefit? The government could legislate that mail cannot be sent unsolicited with stiff penalties for offenders.
4. Packaging Legislation – manufacturers should be given a list of authorised materials that can be used in the packaging process. The simple rule being – if it can’t be recycled, you can’t use it.
5. Supermarket focus – as well as dedicated organic, vegetarian ranges etc how about sections of the store dedicated to recycled products?
6. Changes in the Council Tax – my council tax is exactly the same as any other household in my street, regardless of how much litter I generate. Hardly seems fair to me.
Sadly, I suspect that this is one of those problems that will simply be left until it’s too late.
If the world were like a month on the calendar, the first to the 30th of the month would be someone else’s problem. Only on the 31st would everyone say “We need to do something about this”. But of course, it’s too late by then.
Summary:
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