Never are the bins as full as in the week after Christmas. The one in the kitchen brims with old bags, bones and cans. The living room (a bin in itself, almost) is awash with newspapers, batteries and boxes. Even the fireplace is clogged with charred wrapping paper. And that unmentionable— the bathroom bin — is so stuffed with lush and perfumed packaging, it won’t swing as it should.

Sadly, no figures for Christmas week waste are available (nor yet has anyone been brave enough to sum the world’s total), but each year about 200 million tonnes of household refuse is collected in the United States of America. This is the equivalent of nearly 1000 kilogrammes of garbage per person or roughly fifteen times each individual’s body weight.

Admittedly, North Americans are famous as conspicuous consumers, but the average European still manages to produce roughly 300 kilogrammes of household waste each year, some five times his or her body weight. This means the average household ejects a pile of rubbish weighing over two tonnes each year.

Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders do nearly as badly as North Americans. Greece and Spain come low on the list. Statistics from poorer countries are harder to come by but one fact startles: the richer a country becomes, the more waste it produces. A developing nation will see the quality of its water and sewers improve. Dust and sulphur dioxide levels fall, too. Even deforestation slows. But the volume and the weight of all types of refuse (along with carbon dioxide) soars.

Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas (but one probably with a starring role in any climatic change that may be occurring). Solid waste is a different matter. If it was not removed from around our houses and factories, there would soon be protests. And if previous generations had thrown out as much as we do now, we would be only too aware of the consequences.

The modern archaeologists who, in thick rubber gloves, occasionally sift through this heap on our behalf, tell us that nearly half is packaging: the cardboard, metal, plastic, paper and glass that we have carried things home in. A further third (roughly speaking; few refuse experts agree) is organic matter: potato peelings, orange skins and uneaten food. The rest is paper and what might accurately be called miscellaneous: old shoes, broken toys, unwanted lampshades and so on. Think of Christmas. Of the total, some three-quarters, it is generally admitted, does not need to be thrown away. It can be recycled.

There are two reasons why this is necessary. The first is that recycling conserves raw materials. Recycling paper saves trees, for example (and some estimates suggest that recycling half the paper currently used in the world would free four million hectares of forest from paper production). The second reason is that recycling conserves energy: it takes less energy to make new paper from old than to make it from trees.

The most obvious case in point is aluminium. Recycling it saves not only bauxite (not rare but found mainly under tropical forests) but also incredible amounts of energy. One graphic estimate of the energy required to make an aluminium drinks can is the equivalent of one-third of the can full of oil. Melting the can down so that it can be re-used requires just five percent of the energy needed to make a new one. Similarly, recycling glass saves energy.

The other argument heavily in favour of recycling is that it is getting more and more difficult to find somewhere to put our refuse. Currently, most household refuse is either buried or burnt; dumping at sea has been largely outlawed. But nearly all of the developed countries are running out of space to dig holes to put rubbish in. This is reflected in the cost of what is rather benignly termed ‘landfill’. On the east and west coasts of the US, and in northern continental Europe, it now costs around US$100 a tonne to dump refuse in landfill sites.

Incineration was once seen as a solution to this problem and the incinerator operators often claimed points for using the process to provide heat and power; but the more refuse we burn, the more we discover how unsuitable a method it is. Incinerator smoke can contain some of the most poisonous substances known to man: cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals as well as the infamous dioxins. Witness the public protests at the opening of every new one. What happens when you put a battery in a furnace, after all?

Methods of recycling vary according to the nature of the refuse. The third of household refuse that is organic waste is the most easily recycled. If separated it can be composted and returned to the soil. It is easier for individuals and families who live in the country to do this than city dwellers, but in some towns in Germany each household has been provided with a special green bin which is emptied separately and communally composted by the local authorities.

Glass is easily recycled both at individual and industrial levels. The most obvious way to do this is to reuse the bottle or jar: take it back to be refilled. If this is not possible, the glass can be collected and added to a furnace where new glass is being made. The old glass both melts, adding to the bulk of molten glass in the furnace, and reduces the temperatures needed by the process. The resulting mixture can then be used to make new bottles and jars.

Paper, too, is easily recycled by industry. First it has to be de-inked and immersed in a chemical bath which reduces it to its original fibres. New paper can then be made using orthodox technology, except that often the bleaching process is omitted to avoid the polluting by-products.

Waste metal presents a slightly greater problem as the various metals in our household rubbish need to be separated before they can be recycled. By its lightness, aluminium is readily identifiable and can be easily recycled. But ‘tins’ (such as food is sometimes sold in) present a more complicated problem. First, a plastic-coated tin lining has to be removed; only then can the steel body be melted and re-used.

Plastic presents one of the greatest problems to the aspirant recycler. It represents only about eight percent of the weight of our household rubbish but it doesn’t rot when buried and often produces poisonous gas when burnt. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with plastic as a material but to use a long-lasting material to make an object such as a plastic bag, which has a very short useful life, is patently absurd.

Some of the most technologically advanced refuse research is currently being conducted by groups associated with the large chemical companies which make plastics. One line they are following is to produce plastics that rot, using bacteria which make a biological ‘plastic’, much as mammals make fat. When discarded, this substance is readily broken down by organisms in the soil and a plastic bag made of it will rot completely in about one year.

Plastics manufacturers are also moving away from sophisticated bonded resins, which are lighter but harder to recycle, to simpler, heavier, single resins which last longer and are easier to recycle. One of the few current uses for recycled plastic is to make new products such as heavy-duty floor tiles, sewage pipes or fence posts.

The banding together of large companies such as the plastics manufacturers in Europe is just one example of how refuse and recycling is becoming a billion dollar industry. Several car manufacturers, including Volkswagen, Nissan and BMW, are experimenting with dismantling their old models so that the original materials can be recycled. Dunlop in the UK has recently set up several ‘Welly Banks’ to collect old PVC wellington boots for recycling. A German association of computer manufacturers is also addressing the possibilities of disassembly and reuse. It is packaging, though, that really gets the new breed of environmental economist excited. The science is probably most advanced in Germany where the government has passed a law obliging all companies to take back and recycle the packaging used during transport.

Over the last year, the regulations have got tighter and tighter. Initially, from 1 December 1991 companies were obliged to take back and recycle all transport packaging. From 1 April 1992, they (or their proxies) were obliged to deal with all ‘secondary’ packaging — the box around a bottle of whisky, say —and on 1 January this year Germany woke to a brave new world: all packaging, right down to sugar bags and butter wrappers, must be collected. Furthermore, a strict schedule of recycling target figures has been set and incineration, even if it is used to generate power, is prohibited as a disposal method.

The German packaging industry has drawn up a scheme to deal with this which involves issuing every household with a separate bin for their waste products, which will be marked with a special green dot. The cost of the scheme is estimated to be US$6-9 billion to set up and US$700 million a year to run. This will increase the number of bins outside some German homes to three.

The economics of recycling appear simple: the cost of collection and processing of the refuse has to equal or be less than the price it can be sold at. Without a market for second-hand material, collecting it is useless. The economists talk of a ‘closed loop’ as being ideal: a demand for unbleached, recycled paper, for example, ensures that the value of suitable waste paper stays high.

Unfortunately, though, the sums don’t always add up. An Australian commission looked at a nationwide proposal to levy a deposit on glass drinks bottles in 1987 and estimated that the scheme would cost between A$200 million and A$350 million. The benefits were quantified as reducing the cost of litter collection by A$2-4 million and reducing waste disposal costs by about A$35 million. In the defined economic terms, the scheme made very little sense.

But the sums are also horribly complicated. Plastic bottles, for example, which are usually seen as an ecological liability in a refuse heap, are considerably lighter than glass and so save significant amounts of fuel if they have to be transported. A well-intentioned recycler driving bottles to the local deposit is consuming far more energy than recycling the glass is likely to save. Even putting a light on in a hallway to take bottles out at night is probably enough to tip the balance the wrong way.

The problems of our individual refuse mountains, though, cannot be seen purely in terms of figures. We badly need to change both our attitudes and behaviour. A good way to start is by rejecting all excess packaging in the shop and demanding that recycled materials be used when packaging cannot be totally dispensed with. A further useful step is to separate all refuse at home, compost the organic material, if possible, and ensure that it is dealt with separately and responsibly.

But there’s no need to dread next Christmas already. A new-found environmental interest does not mean you’re limited to drinking tap water and giving energy-efficient light bulbs as gifts. It’s enough of a start to send cards on recycled paper, buy small durable gifts (that require neither batteries nor excessive packaging) and recycle the glass, metal and paper of your cheerful excesses.

Happy New Year!

Source : Sliver Kris, Jan, 1993

Back to Archive Page

Recycling Point Dot Com

(C) 2000 All Rights Reserved