20 August 2015
Recycling – myths and facts
By Lynda Goetz
When my mother-in-law died, she left, apart from some beautiful furniture, a couple of drawers full of luxurious bed linen. I was more than happy to take on the care and custody of all these items. Will the same be true of my daughters? So many friends I know are sad at the thought that beautifully-made furniture, often inherited from their families, will not be welcomed by their own children, who would prefer to furnish their homes with stuff bought new from Ikea, or similar. Most of this furniture is factory made, frequently of MDF rather than wood, and is thrown out in favour of different new furniture a few years later. The stuff being discarded ends up in a giant skip, rather optimistically labelled ‘Wood’, at the local Amenity (where on earth, by the way, was that expression dreamed up – it seems to be in complete contradiction to the usually understood meaning of the word?) or Recycling Centre.
Alongside the skip containing ‘wood’, there is one full of scrap metal, one with abandoned electrical items, another labelled simply ‘household rubbish’ containing mattresses, dead toys and old cushions and probably one containing old cardboard boxes, as well as the familiar bottle banks for different-coloured glass and clothes banks for last year’s fashions and shapeless £2 T-shirts from the discount stores. All over the country mountains of rubbish are being disgorged from cars by the owners, who may have travelled a good few miles (and increased their carbon footprint accordingly), to unburden themselves of all this unwanted paraphernalia of modern life.
Articles in the press advise us to ‘de-clutter’ our lives; to rid ourselves of unnecessary ’stuff’ with which we have, over the years, surrounded ourselves. In some ways, good and useful advice. It is true, after all, that since the end of World War II the increasing consumerism of the developed world has led to a glut of purchasing and materialism which has resulted in the present over-abundance with which we are all familiar. How many stuffed toys does one small child need? How many times are you realistically going to re-read those paperbacks sitting in your bookcases? Those magazines in piles in the corner of the study – are you really going to look things up in them when you could far more easily find what you need from the internet? Thinking of which, what is the point of keeping that old laptop or that old computer keyboard, when you have a brand new iPad to replace them? And when the latest model of phone is unveiled, it is, surely, worth keeping up with the technology? After all, everybody else does, don’t they? The developing world will make use of our old phones and old computers, our old clothes and old books. They will be grateful for them, won’t they?
In the ‘old days’, people used get things mended, or even mend them themselves. Nowadays there are not many incentives to do so and, unless you have the skills yourself, very few places where you can take things to be repaired. It’s gone wrong? Throw it away and get another. ‘They’re cheap as chips’, you’ll hear people say. Is that potato chips or electronic chips? It probably doesn’t matter – they are both cheap these days. As far as food is concerned, it is interesting to note that the proportion of our income spent on food has declined markedly since the middle of the last century. In this country, it is less than 10% of our total income. In the developing world, that goes up to as much as around 45% in countries like Pakistan, Kenya, Indonesia and Azerbaijan (Washington State University research). Is it this which has left us the disposable income to spend on other ‘stuff’ which we then junk? It is certainly true that the younger generations see far less point in hanging on to stuff ‘in case it comes in use’, when for a few pounds you can go out and buy a new one of whatever it is. That bed linen is now polycotton and a double bed sheet can be purchased for relatively little; a set of towels can be purchased for less than £10.00 and nobody uses napkins so why would you want to inherit stuff like that?
The problem with all this, of course, is that now we are not re-using or passing on our belongings, they are becoming nothing more than trash. We try in small ways not to be too wasteful. We ‘generously’ give our unwanted items to charity shops. They used to charge peanuts for them when they sold them. However, now charities are ‘big business’ they are charging ‘business-like’ prices for things and you may have to pay several hundred pounds for someone’s old table and chairs in a charity shop. (Well, given what they have to pay their executives, they probably need to charge those sorts of prices). Apart from charity shops it is extremely hard to find ‘second-hand’ shops these days. It is not worth anyone trying to run them. If people can be bothered, they can sell on eBay or give stuff away through Freecycle (www.freecycle.com ) but otherwise it is down to the ‘Amenity Centre’ with those large redundant items.
What about the smaller stuff? Well, whereas the war generation used to save and re-use elastic bands and brown paper bags, not to mention returning glass bottles to the local shop for refilling, we now pay our Council Tax to local authorities to deal, not only with our rubbish collection, but with our recycling. Once a fortnight, in most areas, your cans, bottles, paper, cardboard and plastic are sorted into compartments in the local contractor’s vehicles. For a brief and glorious few days you will not have to worry about flimsy plastic fruit-packaging containers flying around the place, nor be terrified your neighbours will be commenting on the excessive amount of bottles you seem to leave out for collection week after week. Of course after a few days you will be back to square one and counting down the days until the next recycling day (when your local council can send the next lot of newspapers off to China! www.gethampshire.co.uk). In the meantime, your rubbish bin will be smelling awful because that is also only collected fortnightly and the local authority have not yet got around to dealing separately with food waste, which is, of course, a whole separate issue.
In an era when millions of tonnes (some estimate up to 300 million) of rubbish is produced by this country alone each year; when 16% of the money we pay to buy products is spent on the packaging, which then has to be disposed of somehow; when plastic is causing sea and river pollution; when we know how dangerous piling rubbish into landfill sites can be, recycling is clearly a necessary and important fact of life. Despite efforts by the Government to encourage a decrease in waste, this is not really happening and it is a fact that there will always be a certain amount of unrecyclable waste. The House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee released a report in March 2014 entitled ‘Waste or Resource? Stimulating a Bioeconomy’ which suggest that science and technology can be deployed to ‘transform certain kinds of waste into useful and valuable products’. This would be useful both from an environmental and economic point of view and is an interesting way forward. However this is really addressing commercial waste (e.g. waste gasses from steel mills to produce jet-fuel) and there remains the problem of household waste, 57% of which is still either incinerated or put into landfill.
In a society where we buy a lot, but cherish little and our bed linen and beds, unlike the feather beds of yesteryear, are not only not inheritable items, but so much ‘household rubbish,’ recycling is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. The problem is that it is a business and as such it needs to make a profit. Falling oil prices, a strong US dollar and a weakened Chinese economy are currently combining to make the global recycling business less profitable than ever. As many in the Green movement have been pointing out for a very long time, our current cavalier and wasteful attitude to the resources of the planet probably cannot continue. Pro tem, we are possibly helping the industries of the developing world with our incessant demand for more and more new ‘stuff’ to replace the things we are chucking away, but is our profligate attitude sustainable or should we, perhaps, start examining, from the ground roots up, our lifestyle choices? Apart from rescuing a number of antique dealers from prospective penury, we may be able to preserve some wonderful craftsmanship for a future world which might otherwise be filled with chipped MDF and faux leather reclining chairs – that is before it is all recycled of course.
