Confronting the waste crisis
/Our holiday reading material has changed in recent years and while scanning the magazine shelves at the airport we were excited to grab the January edition of Geographical which had a special report on the global waste crisis. The cover story report gave us loads of information on the global waste tipping point we now find ourselves facing due to Chinas recent ban on accepting the Wests waste material. With new import bans in place and a growing global population producing an ever-greater amount of rubbish, we are finding ourselves in a waste crisis and facing a future world even more awash with garbage than it already is. The article really highlights how much we as individuals need to stop the flow of waste, as well as demanding better packaging from producers and lobbying for improved waste recovery and recycling methods. This is especially important within developed western countries where we tend to produce more waste per capita; we need to get on top of our own waste issues to allow the developing world, who will inevitably produce more waste as they develop, to catch up and potentially put better waste systems in place from the beginning.
Here is a round up of information from the article:
Plastic makes up 12% of global waste according to The What a Waste Global Database published by the World Bank and within plastics waste, the UK is highlighted as having a high % share of plastic waste produced. Overall the UK ranks 14th in a global waste index according to Verisk Maplecroft, with residents generating 482kgs of household waste per year.
‘Since 1950, according to the consultants Verisk Maplecroft, humans have made 8.3bn tonnes of plastic, outpacing almost all other manufactured material, rising from 2m tonnes in 1950 to 322m tonnes in 2015. Half of all the plastic ever made has been produced in the past 15 years. International transportation of plastic waste took off in the early 1990s and by 2016 about half of all plastic waste intended for recycling (14.1m tonnes) was being exported by 123 countries, with China taking most of it (7.35m tonnes) from 43 different countries. By the year 2050, unless we change our habits, the plastic waste mountain will collectively weigh 12bn tonnes.’
‘According to researchers at the University of Georgia, only around 30% of all plastic ever produced is still in use. In an 2017 paper, Production, Use and Fate of all Plastics Ever Made, it was calculated that, of the plastic that has been disposed, 69% resides in landfill or contributes to rubbish littering the planet’s landscapes, 12% has been incinerated and just 9% has been recycled.’
‘UK government figures show that in 2016, 70% of UK packaging waste - 104m tonnes - was either recovered or recycled (exceeding an EU target of 60%)…The amount of plastic packaging collected by UK authorities has increased by 10% since 2013/14 to 550,000 tonnes in 2017….Yet putting recyclables in a kerbside box or supermarket collection point rather than a bin is one thing; stopping the contents from ultimately ending up in landfill, an incinerator or the ocean turns out to be a bit harder. The act of putting waste in a collection box also carries strong connotations of altruistic behaviour, of somehow doing right by the planet; yet the reality of how that waste is then dealt with is quite different. Simon Ellen, chief executive of the Recycling Association, describes what happens next as ‘survival of the fittest’: recycling mills are driven by price - the price they pay for used materials…and the price they receive for selling it back as packaging when it has been repurposed. Recycling is no different to any other commodity, its big business and wealthy business.’’
‘When it comes to recycling, plastic is the most problematic because of the wide variety of uses, additives and blends. None of the commonly-used plastics are biodegradable. 90% of exports for recycling comprise polymer groups often used in single use plastic food packaging and plastic packaging for food, beverages and tobacco is often used only once and contributes to 61% of global beach litter.’
With China and other Asian countries starting to refuse the UKs waste ‘the UK faces some uncomfortable choices in the short term. Peter Sainsbury, chief economist at WRAP, points to plans for the UK to increase recycling capacity to process an additional 250,000 tonnes of plastic waste. Ellin suspects this is ambitious. ‘We will have no extra capacity for 5, possibly 10 years,’ he says. ‘There is no capacity to recycle more in the UK, there’s no capacity to incinerate more than we do already. We should export less but that’s not going to happen unless government gets into action. We’ve got to get our own house in order.' …. Whatever route the UK decides to take, the latest data from the World Bank suggests that more roadside collections of yoghurt pots and film are not going to cut it. Humans, as Dr Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist, has said, ‘are conducting a singular uncontrolled experiment on a global scale, in which billions of metric tons of material will accumulate across all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on the planet.’ In 2010, the people of planet Earth produced 1.3bn tonnes of municipal solid waste a year; we are now well on the way to topping 2.3bn tonnes a year by 2025. According to the consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft, that is enough to fill 822,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Only 16% of that waste is recycled while 46% (950m tonnes) is disposed of unsustainably.’
‘According to UNEP, 111m tonnes of plastic waste will be displaced by 2030 because of China’s new policy…It would be useful, says Bruce Gunn, a director at the Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department of the Asian Development Bank, were governments and individuals to strive to reduce the amount of waste produced in the first place.’The amount of waste being produced is going to grow, so there is an individual responsibility and we need to grow awareness of that.’’
‘As the world struggles to come up with ways to deal with plastic at the end of its generally single use, the disadvantages have become evident. In 2019, the British recycling charity, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), published a report titled Plastics Market Situation which referred to the ‘stark challenges’ that lay ahead. It called for new reprocessing infrastructure to respond both to the loss of overseas recycling options and increased domestic demand as UK businesses reacted to calls from consumers for more sustainable packaging.’
‘In the UK, WRAP has helped establish the UK Plastics Pact, which aims to create both a circular economy for plastics and to reduce plastic use in the first place [and] at the heart of the UK’s approach is what the Department for the Environment, Fisheries and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) refers to as a ‘waste hierarchy’: prevent waste in the first place; if this is not possible, try and re-use it; failing that, recycle; after that ‘other recover’ methods should be used such as incineration; only if all these options have been exhausted should the item be put into landfill.’
‘‘If we can reduce the packaging we use and recycle more of that then that solves a lot of the issues people are worried about,’ says Sainsbury. … Complacency has proved to be a formidable enemy, suggests Gunn…This isn’t something that can be done in a year, it can’t just be this years topic of interest and then the world moves on to another issue. Action has to be sustained over decades.’
All text in ‘ ‘ and image below from Waste World article written by Mark Rowe for Geographical Jan 2020
