Red, Green, and Blue

Like many people, I have become zealous about recycling. On bin day I put out my containers of paper, glass, cans and plastics, and look at my neighbours’ rubbish to see if they are doing as well as I am in reducing the amount of waste that leaves my house and goes to landfill. I’ve already blogged about the disappointment of finding that composting much of our food waste wasn’t a good option in our garden, but now it seems that my recycling efforts might be wasted too.

Commingling

Many local authorities use commingling – which sounds like more fun than it is, all it means is that co-mingled collections are the ones where previously separated waste is crushed together in the back of a dustcart. Once this happens, it’s almost impossible to separate the recycled materials again, so what happens to the waste? Often it’s taken to Materials Recovery Facilities where large amounts of energy are used to try and separate the waste again. Or it’s shipped to India and spread out in fields where people then try to hand pick it back to the original categories. But it’s also often just … dumped in landfill. Precisely what we were told recycling was going to stop in the first place.

Statutory Stupidity

The stupidity of individuals spending time every day to put one kind of rubbish in one place and a different kind of rubbish in another, only to have it all mashed together in a council lorry seems insane. The reason it happens is simple – local councils have no statutory responsibility to consider the environmental impacts of recycling - only to collect as much of it as possible at the lowest possible cost. What happens to it after that doesn’t worry them, as long as they hit their collection targets.

Recycling photograph courtesy of Editor B at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

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