The Madness of Green Washing our Rubbish

A couple of weeks ago, there was a story about a man who was fined for overfilling his bin so that the lid couldn't close. While most of the press and media reported it as, “Council gone mad” I had an open mind. Further, I doubted that the media was reporting the full facts. In fact the media reports were downright bias. I was tempted to make a posting at the time, along the lines of a man gets fined for leaving the lid up, something that all women will understand.

However, I was also aware of the serious aspect, that of the vast amounts of rubbish we in the UK send to landfill. Therefore, I wanted to think that this was more about a council trying to reduce waste rather than officials over reacting to the breaking of rules.

Then, in a separate report, I heard about a small greengrocer who has been fined for recycling cardboard and composting his dead stock. By the same county council.

I have spoken before of the problem of rubbish going into landfill and that I personally am trying to reduce the volume of rubbish that I generate. Even I recognise that I could do more, but will require an investment that I can not afford at this time. But I will make this investment in the future. However, at the moment I only need to have my bin emptied every third or fourth week. Most frequently my bin is not full when emptied. Locally, I still do get weekly collections but some councils have changed to fortnightly collections. This benefits the environment as it reduces the number of miles that the trash trucks have to travel.

But this switch to fortnightly collections has caused some people problems. While for people like me who are environmentally aware, refusing the extra packaging that often makes up most of the rubbish in peoples bins is easy. For most of the population this all means that people need to change their behaviour. This includes the way they shop, not over buying food that just goes strait from basket to fridge to bin.

Therefore, my reaction to the first story was that it seemed that the local council were trying to get the reductions in the volumes of rubbish down, yet this man that was fined was probably not cooperating. However my opinion changed when I heard about the greengrocer who was fined for doing what was right for the environment.

Instead of adding to landfill, he was taking his cardboard to a recycling point and composting the waste food from his shop. But as I suspected with the first story, there is more to this than meets the eye. The recycling point where the greengrocer was taking the cardboard is not open to commercial traders or businesses and there is no recycling of commercial waste. Also as the council charges businesses for collecting rubbish, it hits their revenues if a shop or business doesn't send their rubbish to landfill.

Therefore the real story here is that the council are trying to reduce the volume of household waste as that's a cost, but as business waste generates income...

To me that shows that most of the so called recycling done by councils is nothing more than Green Washing.

A link to the first Story

A link to the Second Story

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