WASTE RECYCLING
JOHN CRAWFORD
JOHN trained at Saltcoats Burgh in the late 60s. After a decade he moved to PD Beatwaste Ltd/ Wimpey Waste Management Ltd. He then joined the Civil Engineering Dept at Strathclyde University before posts at Renfrew, Hamilton, Inverness and East Ayrshire Councils. A Fellow of CIWM, he served on their Scottish Centre Council from 1988-2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland and was their President between 1991-92.
Who exactly was conned?
JUST when I think I’m running out of topics for this column, along comes a TV programme suggesting that waste recycling ‘is a con’... and I’m back on track!
I tried to keep calm when somebody from Keep Britain Tidy sorted through one family’s plastic recyclate box and wondered why nobody from the recycling industry had been invited along instead. Surely KBT has enough on its plate these days trying to sort out the UK’s appalling attitude to dropping litter without offering us advice on how to improve recycling performances?
The cameras then switched to shots of a landfill and the ground-breaking news that ‘the UK will run out of airspace by 2022.’ If that’s true, then anybody delivering a Collection Contract with more than two years to run must have been sweating buckets. And of course there had to be the compulsory shots of an industrial chimney belching out black smoke whenever the presenter mentioned ‘incinerator’, clearly oblivious to current EfW practices and emission controls.
Yet again we had the red herring of ‘Why do councils have different collection regimes as it leads to confusion?’ Honestly, I have no idea how Blackpool Council collects its waste and recyclate; I live in nearby Fylde BC so if I understand their rules, that’s all I need to know.
The Wirral Council was denigrated for being unable to match recycling performances achieved by a rural council in Yorkshire, but to be fair the programme acknowledged the differences in deprivation demographics, and that the more affluent areas in Wirral were just as good at recycling as their Yorkshire counterparts.
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And so it unravelled as the programme went on. We had the usual ‘awesome’ tonnages of waste food generated every year (that regular readers will recall I believe are overstated as I suspect the estimators are including all the packaging jettisoned by householders). And while it’s not nice to smirk, I couldn’t hold back a guffaw when the presenter dumped a (plastic) bag of dried fruit into a food caddy on the grounds that it was ‘past its sell-by date.’ Did he think every AD Plant has its own in-house magician who can make food packaging disappear?
It became evident that the producers were running out of material as the last quarter of the programme was devoted to the dire bacteriological quality of the inside of ‘bags for life’ and the dangers for sportsmen and women who share re- fillable plastic water bottles.
So yet again a great opportunity was missed to tell the public how their behaviour impacts on our recycling performances: the family that hides a bag of disposable nappies in their paper and cardboard bin; those who put the polystyrene tray out with their out of date fruit and veg in the food caddy, and broken coat hangers in their plastic recyclate bin to name but a few. All actions that contaminate these separated streams and feeds the nonsense that ‘the council actually landfills most of your recyclate’.
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