Don't Recycle, Reduce and Re-use!

Last year I wrote an essay on Waste managment in the UK for college, and I was thinking about this issue again the other day.

Much is made of recycling, everyone seems to be getting on the bandwagon; lots of supermarkets now have plastic bag recycling bins and the bins for glass are now ubiquitous.

I recently read some interviews with leading business people questioning them on their "green" credentials and all of them said that they recycle, as if this made up for all the other activities they might be involved in.

What worries me is that the recycling message seems to have become the dominant force and that other ways of dealing with waste have become sidelined.

The waste management hierachy (left) indicates that the best way of dealing with waste is to reduce it; i.e. don't make it in the first place. Second on this list is to re-use; milk bottles delivered to the front door in the UK are a good example of this; an interesting article on the Daily Pinta is on J's blog.

In fact, recycling is third down the list in the ideal way of dealing with waste, but it is firmly number one in the public's eye. This indicates that we are far from the problem of the massive amounts of waste we create, and consequently the large amounts of CO2 that are emitted in the production of this waste.

In the absence of governmental incentives for industry to reduce waste we should try to do what we can; use reusable shopping bags, buy produce at the market where items are not overpackaged and reuse things like jam jars to grow seeds in etc.