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Britain’s domestic wasteEach year in Britain we produce millions of tons of rubbish, always a bit more than the year before. Where are we going to put it all?How bad is the problem? Fifty years ago, our dustbins were full of ashes from domestic coal fires, on which much household rubbish was burnt. Now, due to clean air rules and central heating, we burn nothing at home. Instead, every man, woman and child in Britain chucks away half a ton of rubbish a year, the weight of a small car; London fills an Olympic-size swimming pool with rubbish every half-hour. Since the mid-Nineties, the overall volume of domestic waste has been growing by 3% per year, though that has recently slowed to 2%. What explains the relentless Increase? Our throw-away culture (and the fact so many more of us live on our own, creating separate loads of rubbish). We fill our bins with pizza cartons, cans, fast-food packaging and piles of paper. We treat plastic as disposable, though plastic bottles can last 450 years: the world's annual consumption of plastic materials has increased from five million tons in the Fifties to 100 million today. Meanwhile, the rise of supermarkets and obsession with presentation has led to a steep rise in packaging. In some places, consumers are hitting back: in Germany, shoppers peel off excess packaging at the checkout and leave the supermarket to deal with it; in Ireland, a tax on plastic bags means people take their own bags to the shops. Here in Britain such schemes haven't got off the ground. Where does all our rubbish go? Most goes into huge sealed holes in the ground, otherwise known as landfill sites. For Britain, with its plenitude of disused mines, old quarries and impermeable soils, this is a temptingly cheap option. Landfill has a long history. In the US, it was often used to fill in swamps and marshes: the three main airports of New York City, including JFK and LaGuardia, are built on landfill rubbish. But it is an option increasingly frowned upon. What's so bad about landfill sites? One problem used to be the rainwater that percolates through the hill of rotting paper, broken TVs, garden waste, nappies, cans and food to form a toxic fluid known as leachate. Hitherto that would seep into the soil below, contaminating groundwater. Modern landfill sites deal with this by sealing the vast pit with an impervious shell and draining off the leachate. But other issues remain. Modern sites still give off harmful methane gases that contribute to global warming. Above all, landfill offends against the spirit of good housekeeping: most of what goes in there could be recycled. EU directives say that by 2009 member states must cut the amount going to landfill to half of 1995 levels; and to 35% by 2016. (Britain has been granted an extra four years' leeway.) How do we compare with others? In 2004/05 English households recycled about 22% of their waste, an improvement on previous years but still one of the lowest rates in Europe. By contrast Austria recycles 64%, Belgium 52% and Holland 47%. Only Greece and Portugal have a worse record. In Britain, for every ten binfuls of household rubbish, one is burnt, two recycled and seven tipped into holes in the ground. Experts say that unless drastic action is taken, Britain has no hope of meeting the EU's landfill directive. If it doesn't, the taxpayer will have to foot a bill of millions of pounds a day in fines. Why are we such laggards? Because landfill is cheap and in the absence of enlightened prodding from government, there's scant incentive to change our wasteful ways. True, a landfill tax was levied on business in 1996, but it was too small to alter behaviour. Germany, by contrast, has long required that all household waste must be pre-treated through mechanical biological treatment (MBT) before going to landfill, and since that involves sorting the rubbish, MBT has encouraged recycling. Or consider garden and kitchen waste - about a third of our household rubbish. It's thought that fully 40% of it could be composted, yet failure to come to agreement on standards for compost content has retarded development of large-scale composting facilities. So today little more than 5% is composted. So what is the Government now planning to do? In its review of recycling policy, it set a target for 2020 to have 27% of all household waste in England burnt in incinerators (compared with 9% today) and to reduce waste sent to landfill from 72% to 25% - the rest to be recycled. Incinerators have the advantage of using the waste they burn to make electricity; and tougher rules since 1996 mean they spew out far fewer acid gases and harmful dioxins. But capital costs are so high, incinerator operators will only proceed if local authorities can guarantee a constant supply of waste for 25 years or so. This, combined with ferocious local opposition to any proposal to build one, makes burning a tricky option. But then the infrastructure for recycling (e.g. the big sorting plants called Material Recycling Facilities or Murfs) is hugely costly too. The investment needed to hit the EU’s recycling targets comes to £10bn, says the Institute of Civil Engineers, or £400 for every household. And no company is likely to take the plunge until assured of a bigger market for its recycled material. Then are we doomed to fail? Not necessarily. The waste industry can adapt incredibly quickly. In 2002, for instance, Britain was caught on the hop by an EU directive making it illegal to dispose of old fridges in landfill sites or have them crushed by scrap metal dealers. Germany alone had the specialist machinery to extract the insulating foam (and its ozone-destroying CFC gases) from fridges, so "fridge mountains" began piling up around Britain. Yet in a few years British companies built the requisite plant, and the mountains have gone. Much now depends on the Government's ability to stimulate the market in recycled material. One part of that means offering companies financial incentives to use a greater proportion of such material in their production schedules. The harder part is to get the public more involved. In Ireland they now tax households for the amount of non-recycled waste they produce. We could do that here, too. See also Pollution Great Smog of 1952 The Great stink Waste Radioactive waste Nuclear waste’s final resting place |
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