Eco-confusion

Earlier this year, I started taking one year old compost from my compost bin, to carpet the beds in my greenhouse ready for growing luscious, more or less organic tomatoes, courgettes, sweet peppers, chillies, and various veg seedlings. Imagine my surprise, when, amongst the rich brown well rotted compost I found a pristine white carrier bag, in mint condition apart from a little superficial dirt, carrying the following message, in dainty green print: “This bag is fully BIODEGRADABLE and 100% COMPOSTABLE”.

I don’t mind saying that I was miffed! I felt that I had been deceived – sold a pup – conned.

I dusted off the bag, photographed it, and started to search the internet for signs of its origin. And I found the website of a company that supplies this very bag. (To be fair, they are not the only supplier.)

My next stop was to Trading Standards – their office is not far away. They expressed their interest and promised to follow it up – and I’m sure they will, although who knows when?!

Then, still simmering with the resentment of the deceived, I emailed the Radio 4 programme ‘You and Yours’.

I also contacted my son who is knowledgeable about such things, and has useful contacts.

You have no idea how interesting and complicated this subject becomes! Apart from all the rules which define what temperature and under what circumstances various degradable plastic products should actually degrade, there is the question as to whether it is a good idea to produce degradable plastic containment at all.

Why would anyone prefer to use a bag which claims to be biodegradable? I suppose because they believe it is a more ‘environmentally friendly’ than the other kind.

This was a point for very brief discussion when the ‘You and Yours’ presenter interviewed me this morning.

So what would someone do with such a bag when it has outlived its usefulness? I guess that they would either put it in their compost bin, as I did, or put it in their household rubbish, probably to go to landfill, where it would safely degrade and feed the worms. Or perhaps they would put it into one of those bag recycling banks that some supermarkets have.

If a biodegradable bag finds its way into the bag recycling process, the fact that it is biodegradable is likely to adversely affect the quality of the recycled material.

If the same bag gets into a landfill site, it will degrade, and in the process, most of its bulk will convert to greenhouse gas, some of which may be captured, in a well-run site, but most of which will go to atmosphere.

The argument goes that a non biodegradable bag in landfill will do less damage to the atmosphere, because the carbon content is sequestered below ground for the foreseeable future, causing no damage to the atmosphere!

To summarise – we, the public, are only confused by this type of marketing, and we achieve no environmental benefit. The myths promoted by people jumping on the green-agenda bandwagon are simply a marketing tool in the same category as those used by double glazing salesmen to promote the benefits of their products.

But our dilemma is not resolved here!

If I am to believe my movie viewing, in America the supermarkets give out paper sacks to hold the groceries. Surely that is more environmentally friendly?

I just don’t know! I have just watched a Youtube trailer which shows huge old trees in ancient forest in Tasmania being blasted out of the ground to be converted to woodchips for conversion to pulp for paper, thus ‘liberating’ immense tonnages of carbon to add to our climate change problems. I believe that the process of making paper on a commercial scale is not an environmentally friendly business either, using as it does various chemicals, and no doubt copious amounts of power.

When we see someone’s beautifully oiled teak garden furniture, we may be inclined to wonder what kind of sustainable source produced the timber. But when we collect our mushrooms into a supermarket-supplied paper bag, do we wonder about the environmental impact of the paper?

The fact is that most of us don’t have a clue about what damage the goods we buy do to our planet.

There is a partial solution, at an individual level, and it is this. Wake up on a fine sunny spring morning, have a good stretch, and resolve to unburden yourselves from all that messy desire to buy, to own, to possess for the sake of it. Try not to buy anything unless you are happy with the way it will eventually be disposed of. Don’t believe the ‘authorities’ which claim that electrical goods are being safely recycled – it often isn’t happening!

If a manufacturer doesn’t know how his product can be safely disposed of – he shouldn’t be making it. If a shopper doesn’t know how his purchase can be safely disposed of at the end of its life, he shouldn’t be buying it.

Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle – aim for ZERO WASTE!!

What Should We Do With Our Rubbish?

I went to Sainsbury today to pick up a few bits and bobs which are not stocked by our local ‘Happy Shopper’ (what a euphemism!), and because somebody mentioned it to me the other day, I took careful note of plastic bag use by my fellow shoppers.

Sainsbury has a policy, allegedly, wherein the store does not put plastic bags out on display, and only provides them if asked. The trouble is that my local store (Truro) makes an exception at the ‘hand-basket’ check-outs, so that if someone wants to nip through quickly with a couple of items, they are likely to use a plastic bag out of habit, because it’s there.

And on a Saturday, when the store is full and everyone is in a tearing hurry to get done, get home, get the TV on etc., the check-out staff seems to adopt the idea that time will be saved if they prepare several plastic bags in readiness for filling even though they are no longer displayed. Most of the shoppers I saw were using plastic bags.

I shall of course contact Sainsbury head office about this, and will expect the usual bland and reassuring comment in reply – I guess they see me coming!

The disposal of what is termed Municipal Waste is a subject which has occupied my mind for several years. On the basis that it has to go somewhere, I have involved myself with the local District Council (which ceases to exist on April 1st) in trying to promote recycling, and sensible waste collection policies. The bizarre situation has been that the Districts have been responsible for collection, and the County has been responsible for disposal. And the County Council, which also ceases to exist on April 1st, has taken a number of decisions in this and other regards with no consideration of public opinion whatsoever, in a way which has suggested the antithesis of ‘joined-up’ government.

One such decision, taken initially about 10 years ago, was to award the contract for disposal of Cornwall’s municipal waste to that well known champion of the environment, the French firm Sita. The contract is for 30 years, and Sita have made the assumption that they have the whole deal buttoned up, including the collection side of things, for the foreseeable future.

They may turn out to be wrong.

During the last decade, the County Council and Sita have been championing the idea of an incinerator, placed more or less centrally in Cornwall, to burn everything which cannot be recycled. I admit that when I first attended a presentation of the scheme given by an enthusiastic Council Officer, I thought it sounded pretty good. But over time I took the trouble to do a bit of research (which apparently the Council had failed to do) and it has become increasingly clear that the scheme was very deeply flawed on a number of different fronts – not least because technology has moved considerably since the initial contract was awarded. Something else which became clear was that the costings were based on very out of date fuel costs.

Imagine a long thin county with water on three sides (three and three quarters if you count the river Tamar). Then ask yourself the question, should all the waste be transported to a single point, or should it be disposed of more locally? I think that this is a no-brainer. On top of that, there are the health issues which are significant, the environmental issues, and the look of the thing (a 15 meter diameter 120meter tall chimney in the middle of the Cornish countryside, taller than the Statue of Liberty, on land already about 150 meters above sea level,) as well as the shear inefficiency of that type of plant when compared to other more environmentally friendly solutions.

Considering all the facts, I am amazed that Sita even bothered top put in a planning application. I am not amazed, but I am delighted, that the application was refused (you guessed it – by the relevant committee of that self-same County Council)!

And Sita does not have a plan B!

One could write a book on the implications of this decision, and of course Sita may appeal. Because the County Council and Sita have wasted so much time on this crazy proposal, we are a long way behind where we should be, and are running out of landfill space. The County is likely to be fined for not meeting targets, and someone will have to move very quickly to come up with an alternative scheme.

For years, some of us have felt a bit like those small puny kids at the back of the class who know the answers but can’t attract the teacher’s attention – “Please, miss, ask me! Ask me!”

Now at last, maybe they will ask us.

There are many good ideas out there – possibly too many. As my daughter said to me in a different context, ‘A watched clock never boils, and then three turn up at once!’

Great Recycling Myths

I went to a ‘conference’ about rubbish/recycling/composting in Cornwall last Friday.

The first thing to note was that there was an enthusiastically high level of apathy!

The second thing was that the County Council Officer who was running it was patronising, bland, anodyne and not very well informed!

The third thing was that the content of the seminar was aimed at encouraging all the people who were not there. The people who were there were already up to speed.

One thing that I did learn was that most of the waste collected in Cornwall for recycling is sent to a MRF (known as a ‘murf’ and short for Mechanical Recycling Facility), rather than being separated by the householder. And this is the bit I am very unhappy with.

Where MRF’s are used for separating the recyclables, the local authorities are inclined to say ‘send us all your plastics, glass and cans’, which means that the householder thinks they are doing a wonderful job with very little effort.

Recyclables which are separated by mechanical means do not generally get separated into different types of plastic. These plastics are baled up and sent to a specialist contractor (who may be in China or India) where a certain amount of hand separation may be carried out – often by children – and a percentage is recycled, while a percentage (often large) is sent to someone else’s landfill, where it decomposes over many years producing methane in the process; and methane is more damaging than CO2 by a factor of 20.

Mechanical separation is liable to produce a high level of contamination, for example, paper contaminated by bits of glass making it unusable, so it has to go to landfill.

I cannot disagree with the principle that large quantities of waste will need some mechanical means of separation, but with the right machinery, and, importantly, the right level of co-operation from the householder, a much better and more honest conversion rate can be achieved.

My own local authority asks the householder to separate recyclables thus:
White paper (including newsprint etc.)
Coloured paper and cardboard (including yellow pages)
Glass jars and bottles (rinsed and with tops removed)
Cans, aluminium foil, plastic bottles (tops removed), aerosols (tops removed)

The fourth category is mechanically separated at the recycling centre (but not shredded). The amount of material collected for recycling, and then not recycled is no more than 2%.

My authority does not kid us that they can recycle products which they clearly cannot (such as yoghurt pots, plastic bottle tops, margarine tubs, tetrapaks etc.) so when we are told how many tonnes we have recycled in a month, we are being told the truth.

Although the percentages differ from one MRF to another, the amount of material eventually recycled can be as low as 20% of the total which the residents believe that they are recycling.

I fancy that the main problem to address in the recycling of domestic waste is to close the gap between what we are told is recycled and what is actually recycled (without, of course, adding to China’s pollution problem).

In other words, it’s time that both we and the local authorities stopped kidding ourselves and started accepting the truth!

If In Doubt - Ask

We are all conditioned by our environment.

In the UK we are looked after by the welfare state ‘from the cradle to the grave’, and we have got used to it. In fact we get more used to it every year as new laws are brought in to protect us from ourselves. Probably when we think about it we resent it.... but then we just accept it as the new status quo.

I am not automatically against these new constraints, but I do worry that we don’t think beyond them. We learn to take them for granted, and we forget to ask questions... or we are just too lazy.

I have been increasingly interested in the way that our population and our politicians have adopted the recycling doctrine. The speed with which this country moved from cynical indifference to steadfast commitment has been breath-taking; and since I live in a county which has more or less run out of landfill sites, I am delighted.

But we are still falling into the same trap of allowing the State to look after us, and assuming that everything outside our own little box will be ‘taken care of’.

I have been reading a lot of stuff about recycling – different local authorities have different ways of dealing with the problem. Some collect all the recyclates in one bin, to be separated mechanically at a recycling centre. Others ask the householder to carry out the separation. Not all authorities offer the same recycling opportunities.

When I read that local authority ‘a’ asks you to put out paper and cardboard, and explains how it will be recycled, while local authority ‘b’ asks you to separate cardboard and coloured paper from white paper, so that the white paper can be used to make more white paper, then I guess one of the authorities is doing better than the other.

But the trouble is that we don’t know which, and we don’t know who to ask. And we don’t know for sure that the paper is being recycled, or whether it's being used to the best advantage, or how many miles it travels before being processed. (A lot of mechanically separated paper cannot be used because it's contaminated with glass.)

My local authority will not process yoghurt pots because there is nowhere within a sensible distance where this can be done – so it goes to landfill, because that's the greenest available option. Other local authorities say that they will take all plastics, all mixed in together, for recycling. Do I believe them? Not really, but I could be wrong, in which case, my local authority is under-performing.

So if your local authority says it can recycle, say, plastic mushroom cartons, do you just put them in the green bin and hope for the best? Or do you ask the local authority exactly what they do with them?

I really hate being a cynic...