the truth about waste

Humans, like many mammals, have always produced waste. Indeed, to the field ecologist’s delight, water voles (Ratty of Wind in the Willows fame) naturally leave untidy piles of leftover leaves from their last meal as a sure sign of their presence on riverbanks. Dumps of human feeding remains, or middens as archaeologist call them, date back to the Stone Age when our hunter gatherer ancestors began to live in more settled communities, exploiting freshwater mussels, oysters, clams or whelks. However, the first recorded instance of true recycling is from 1031 in Japan, when the process of reusing wastepaper became common practice in order to conserve materials and maximise output.

Since 1971 when Friends of Friends of the Earth returned thousands of empties to the London HQ of Cadbury Schweppes calling for bottle recycling, the act of putting out your weekly recycling has been synonymous with being “Green” and “doing your bit for the environment.”

Indeed, there are carbon emission savings by recycling virtually all materials (Figure 1. Aluminium drinks cans made of recycled aluminium can save over 8,000kg CO2e per tonne of aluminium compared to using bauxite ore. Whilst recycling is definitely a very good thing this doesn’t mean we can then be profligate with other aspects of our lifestyles. It requires recycling 8,500 aluminium drinks cans to offset the carbon emission from just one return flight to New York.

Waste collection and recycling are the only services provided by local authorities that are used by virtually every citizen; so getting it right is essential for local politicians who want to get re-elected. The sharp end of recycling is about big noisy lorries and recycling crews working their socks off in all weathers. No matter how many people wash out their yogurt pots beforehand, it is a dirty, smelly business and those operatives taking away our leftovers should be considered as doctors of the earth and held in the same esteem as nurses or surgeons.

Plastic is often seen as an environmental villain and, having worked in the Antarctic I have seen first-hand the devastating impact of discarded plastic on fur seals, penguins and albatrosses.  Of the vast amounts of plastic in the oceans 95% originate from just 10 rivers, mainly in South East Asia. However, plastic, if used correctly, is an amazing material responsible for saving millions from food poisoning. It is strong, light, long lasting, and given the right incentives and facilities can be recycled.

Technically, virtually all plastic can be recycled once sorted into the different polymers, although carrying a large amount of plastic filled with air to the nearest recycling plant is perhaps not always the best use of diesel fuel. Sorting is mainly done automatically but with a manual sort to ensure all contaminants and those tricky black plastic trays have been removed. Once sorted and cleaned, plastic can either be shredded into flakes or melt processed to form pellets before finally being moulded into new products. The final use, be it another milk bottle, fence post or clothing is dependent on global markets and particularly the price of oil; as the price of oil goes up it is cheaper to recycle plastic.  It is still far better to put plastic out for recycling than for incineration or throwing in the nearest river. Most of the plastic collected by Stroud District Council is recycled in the UK mainly because the residents of the district are so diligent in their recycling habits resulting in a very low contamination rate.

Glass can in theory be recycled almost indefinitely, but how many bottles of your favourite wine that you bought recently were made from recycled glass?   Whilst a proportion of glass is turned back into bottles most glass sent for recycling is crushed and reused for a variety of purposes from the sparkle in kitchen work tops to aggregates for roads. Even for the latter there are carbon emissions savings over quarried rock.   

Pouring wine from a fine glass bottle, always somehow feels superior than from a box or a tetra pack but here the environmental impacts of the container get murky and not quite as straight forward.  Tetra packs can be recycled, the card being very valuable, although the plastic or metal lining are more difficult. Then there is the added issue of the weight of the bottles transporting your favourite Chardonnay or Rocca compared to the minimal weight of a box or tetra pack and the fact that one can stack many more litre boxes of wine into a shipping container than glass bottles. Overall the carbon footprint of wine in bottles is five times greater than in boxes or tetra pack.  Other than using Oak casks, probably, the most environmentally friendly way to transport wine long distances is in large re-useable plastic containers to be decanted in the supermarket or bar into your own favourite reusable container. I still have a plastic sports drinks bottle which I bought for a cycle touring trip to Spain in 1990 which has been used for water, fruit juice, Gloucestershire cider and even red wine from plastic barrels in Andalucían bars.  While recycling is far better than incineration, reuse, is in the long term, even better.

Simon Pickering

References

Turner D.A., Williams I.D, and Kemp, S.  2015 Greenhouse gas emission factors for recycling of source-segregated waste materials Resources, Conservation and Recycling Volume 105, Part A, December 2015, Pages 186-197.

How bad are Bananas? The Carbon footprint of everything. Mike Berners-Lee > Profile books 2010

Schmidt, C. Krauth, O.T. Wagner, S. 2017 Export of Plastic Debris by Rivers into the Sea Environ. Sci. Technol. 2017, 51, 21, 12246-12253