Plastic Bags

[bunn]

Nice to see that Modbury has banned the plastic bag: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1717476.ece

Or at least the local traders have anyway, and ISTR that Modbury has no supermarket.

However, all this fuss about carrier bags - all very well, but. It's the usual thing: make a big fuss about something that people can feel guilty about and they can buy a cotton bag and feel they are Making A Difference.

Yet every week we get bags and bags and bags delivered to our house containing unrequested mail order catalogues, leaflets, and other marketing materials. I actually recorded what was going into our bins for a couple of weeks, and the single largest amount of plastic by a long way was the wrappings from these unsolicited mailings. Of course we recycle the contents, but the energy involved in printing and sending all this stuff must be enormous, and you can't recycle the bags.
You can't even re-use them as they have no handles, they aren't clean enough for food, and they usually have little holes in so they aren't suitable as poo-bags*.

My family have always recycled. Well before it was fashionable to do so, we carefully sorted our rubbish and took it to a recycling facility, composted what could be composted, re-used wrapping paper and bags and all the rest. We had solar water heating panels installed back in the 1980s, and were early adopters of the first low-energy lightbulbs. I was paper recycling coordinator for my college. I am not uncommitted to energy efficiency and recycling as a concept.

But increasingly I am convinced that anything that relies on individuals all being careful in their own little way is hugely overshadowed by the massive carbon footprint of the people who will never bother unless the system itself is changed, and it just becomes easier to get it right than to get it wrong.

I strongly suspect that all my careful recyclings over my entire lifetime are as nothing compared to the sheer quantity of plastic wasted by, say Screwfix Direct on one mailing of their endless bloody catalogue. More and more mail order catalogues seem to be appearing: it is annoying when ordering from a website results in promotional emails for evermore, but how much worse is it then you get a pile of paper as well?

The current fuss about fortnightly rubbish collection is a similar thing. There is no reason at all that collecting rubbish fortnightly should mean that there is LESS rubbish overall. Rather than try to force millions of individuals to carefully think through and plan their purchasing decisions and household affairs so that they have less packaging to throw away, why not simply reduce the amount that goes into their houses by addressing the problem of the people who supply the stuff?

The Modbury model is the right one, in that it is led by the traders: it's not yet another attempt to guilt individuals into a huge series of tiny, almost pointless processes. Sadly I suspect that larger businesses will point to it and say 'we can't do that, they are only little, and we are BIG BIG BIG!'

Which may be true, but is no excuse for just sitting around taking the profits and not thinking.

*the environmental impact of poo-bags is something I shall rant about at some other time.

Comments

[chainmailmaiden]

My family was one of the early recyclers too. My parents have always had a compost heap and did things like make their own yoghurt and bread. My Mum has always used a reusable shopping bag and before they had to use the car to get to the shops, she had a shopping trolley too. I think we were though of as very odd when we used to refuse plastic bags. (The down side of this somewhat hippy lifestyle was being made to wear Jesus sandals growing up & that my Dad still wears them with socks(!!!) in the summer).

When I went into Waitrose today with my reusable bag, the checkout girl said it was a very old one and that I should replace it! As it happens there's nothing wrong with it apart from the fact the design is from a couple of years ago - it's not actually worn out, so I declined.

I feel your annoyance over Screwfix too. I buy quite a bit from them, but wish there was a way to stop them spamming me with catalogues & mailshots. I don't think a week goes by without them sending something to me. I think that you are right, while it is good for individuals to do their bit, we need the manufacturers to lead the way. Maybe when I have my procurement qualification I'll be able to do more about this...

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

I've been recycling since the very early 90s but these days its a real help to live in places that do a recycling box collection as that saves a lot of work for many people and gets more done. Ours even take junk mail in the envelope no pfaffing or sorting, although as they don't do plastics here those wrappers do have to be binned. If they started weighing our bins we'd be quids in as most of our rubbish is plastic wrapping of one kind or another - and there'd be less if supermarkets did milk in glass bottlesand took the bottles back the same as a milkman.

As for changing the system, I supect that the Daily Rail and UKIP voting slice of Britain would be up in arms about it, because the best way to do it and the best example I know of is the way Germany did it. The then government set up a company, Resy (?) to oversee recycling of packaging and companies and shops were told that you produce it - you deal with it. So if you had a packet of something that was wrapped in 2 layers of card and plastic eg kiwi fruits you could unwrap them, keep what you needed to get them home (and which you could recyle at home), and just leave the rest in the shop for them to recycle. And the various companies were pressurised into making as much as possible of their packaging recyclable, or made from recycled and recyclables.
So unlike Britain since the 80s (ah Corona fizzy pop) you can still buy bottle of fizzy pop in Aldi, Minimal or Grosso drink it, take the bottle back and get your 10cents back on it, or put it towards your next buy. The same is true apparently even for little plastic bottles of beer from Aldi, over there, as they can wash and reuse the same as with glass.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

We have a recycling box collection, but it's almost more trouble than it's worth. Only fortnightly, so we can never remember which week it is. Glass, newspapers and stapled magazines only; no junk mail or envelopes, no cardboard packaging, no glued magazines. I often wonder how many people now recycle less, since the system has got so confusing - because, at the same time they started the kerb-side recycling, they got rid of a lot of bottle banks and all the paper banks.

When we visited Pellinor's family last, I noticed that wherever there was a public bin, there were also matching bins for plastic bottles and metal cans. I think all these ideas need to be standardised, so the whole country has to same good practice.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

The problem is that each local council does it differently and consequently has different rules and regulations.

Birmingham recycles its own cardboard. It has a cardboard manufacturing company in the city, so all recycled cardboard goes there and gets turned into new cardboard for packaging new stuff.

Contrast that with Dudley Metropolitan District. It takes cardboard, but it sends it to Kent! As it is made into paper there Dudley MDC only accepts lightweight stuff.

Also Dudley MDC accepts plastic bottles and similar. However, instead of being recycled into new plastic bottles it burns them for power. Lets make lots more greenhouse gasses people! Yes, burn the stuff that can't be recycled, but not the stuff that can.

One of the good things about Telford was that it had very good recycling facilities. And it enforced its recycling / waste policies. It recycled plastic bottles and they were recycled. People didn't like the fortnightly rubbish collections, but they actually worked quite well. The only people who were adversely affected were those who just threw away anything and everything. It is those people who need to be penalised for their poor social behaviour. Telford did that: people didn't get their bins emptied if they were too full.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I fervently disagree with your last paragraph. Fortnightly collections are fine for people who produce a constant and manageable stream of rubbish. In my view they unfairly penalise people whose lives are less stable and predictable: for example those who have just had a new baby, done some house renovating, have just moved house, ill, been bereaved, or thrown a once-in-a-decade family party. They are particularly difficult for people who have limited space to store rubbish (and rubbish does take up more room if you separate it), and no car.

Yes, all those are situations where recycling is *possible*. But I'm really thinking now that important services like rubbish collection should not be about punishing the people that pay for them. They should be about enablement and help, and accepting that sometimes people just need a bit of leeway, and that maybe it would be easier to get the suppliers of the rubbish to help out than punish individuals for bad decisionmaking.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

A number of the examples you mention are very short term one-off. The system employed by Telford catered for those very things: you could 'phone up the council and say "we've done X and have got a bigger amount of rubbis than usual, would you collect it please". They would then make arrangements to collect that extra.

For people who had new born babies there were other similar arrangements. I didn't pay any attention to those as they weren't going to apply to us. However, disposable nappies are particularly evil.


The system they were trying to run wasn't about punishing the people who pay for them but it did include punishment of those people who abused them. Without some form of incentive people will just continue on in their own sweet way. People don't like change.

I'm all for leeway, but I'm also for responsibility. Just taking away people's rubbish and burying it in a hole is removing the responsibility of the rubbish from the people who are producing it. By saying we will take X volume of rubbish from you, and provide you with unlimited recycling puts the responsibility back to the rubbish producers.

I also fully support getting the producers of over packaged consumer goods to not package so much. In a thee pack of penguin biscuits do we really need three levels of packaging? A wrapper round each biscuit, a wrapper round a line of seven (or eight packaged biscuits) and a wrapper wound the three lines of packaged biscuits. That is just one such example, there are many others, suppliers of electronic goods are frequently appaling in this area.

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

I must admit I don't like the way some local authorities seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to recyle, or just do plain stupid things (vice Sigisgrim's comment). Ours at least says "tins, bottles, paper, junk mail and magazines" and "no plastics and no cardboard" so its reasonably clear and they've done it without taking away other recycling facilities so we can take excess stuff, like cardboard, to a collection at Waitrose.
To be honest I don't understand why councils around Brum don't take cardboard and shove it at the company Sigisgrim mentions - there's surely a better deal for them and the environment in that.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Remember that they have this whizzo scheme at the Council whereby all the rubbish gets sorted for us. I almost think that the paper and glass bit is just to make people think they're helping, as the Council seems to pick paper and glass out of the general waste anyway.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

to make people think they're helping

I hate that sort of thing. It devalues the whole exercise. Surely it cannot be beyond human wit to make a clear statement on what needs to be separated and what doesn't?

I don't really understand why non-aluminium cans need to be separated, for example, as you can just fish it out with a big magnet. Back in the 80's I'm sure environmentalist literature used to say that this was done routinely by most councils, and it was more important to separate out glass, as that becomes non-extractable very quickly. What happened to that? Was it ever true, I wonder?