What a waste

In previous Blogs I have talked about the problem of rubbish. In the UK we send more of our waste to landfill than any other country in Europe.

Personally, I work hard to avoid collecting packaging in the first place. No plastic bags, nor packaging or anything that can’t be reused or recycled. Thus in any normal month I will normally only need to put my own bin out, a normal sized wheelie Bin, once a month. I say normally as I do also add to my own rubbish the detritus that I collect from my local wood. It’s frustrating that so many people do leave their rubbish in the wood. I always bring my rubbish back with me. I also take the equivalent of a bin bag full of beer and drinks cans to the recycling point. These I should point out are collected from the wood not that I am drinking gallons of beer myself. While I would love to be drinking that much, I could never afford to become a real dipsomaniac, so I just practice.

However, the real point is that it is not difficult to ensure that I reduce the impact I have on the level of waste that goes into landfill. There is a real green benefit in reducing our waste as if our rubbish was only collected once a fortnight instead of once a week would halve the carbon-dioxide pollution emitted in one fail swoop.

Also we need to reuse and recycle much more. When I was a child everyone had their milk delivered in glass bottles that were reused time and time again. While the added weight would have added to the amount of carbon it took to deliver and collect them, it was and still is greener than buying from the supermarket, the way that milk is bought today.

The problem is that milk is now predominantly sold in plastic cartons. This means that the cartons are single use and as very little plastic is recycled, the saving in reduced carbon outputs from the lighter weight packaging, is more than lost by the carbon footprint from the manufacture and disposal of all this plastic. Further, as the supermarkets use centralised distribution, your milk will have travelled hundreds if not thousands of miles.

The problem of waste is a serious problem, while many people do recycle; locally there is a real problem, as our local council doesn’t recycle any cardboard or plastic. So I am pleased to see that three of the local authorities in the region are looking at ways of dealing with our waste.

Personally, I have always disagreed with many environmentalists, as I have always been an advocate for waste to energy solutions. While burning rubbish will produce pollution not just CO2 but all sorts of other harmful chemicals, but some waste has to be incinerated, therefore it must be better to use the energy this creates. Not only will waste to energy projects replace fossil fuels, but also as the waste is not shipped the great distances that fossil fuels are transported. Thus further reducing the carbon footprint.

In the past when trying to get people to take waste to energy seriously, opponents have always said that if we reduced the rubbish we produce then any facility producing energy would run out of fuel. Well if that ever happened then we would really have all turned green.

The BBC News Report