Will recycling your rubbish save the planet?
Do your empty bottles find a new lease of life after you creep out with the rubbish at the crack of dawn? Eco-sceptic Max Davidson reports.
It is waste collection day, which means an early start. The bin men arrive just after 7 a.m., so by 6:30 I am in my kitchen, sorting my rubbish.
Rinse glass bottles and put them in the green box.
Wash-and-squash plastic bottles and put them in the blue box.
Cans here, newspapers there. I could do it in my sleep.
By 6:55, I am carting the boxes out into the street. Others are doing the same.
Spectral figures in dressing gowns flit through the morning mist. Neighbour peers at neighbour.
Blimey! She’s got through a lot of whisky. Does he read the Daily Mail? I had him down as a Guardian man.
The clink of empty bottles drowns the birdsong.
Why do I do it? I do it because I do it. I used to cudgel my brain and try to decipher the logic of the coloured boxes. Why did envelopes go in the blue box, but paper in the green box? Why were yoghurt cartons not allowed in either? Why were plastic bottles O.K., but not plastic bags? Now, like millions, I just do it.
They trained us to wear seat belts and now they have trained us to recycle rubbish. At daybreak, a time when our grandparents used to tramp through smog to the factories and their grandparents were out ploughing the fields, we are sitting on the kitchen floor, squashing cardboard boxes, or peering at the labels on tins of soup. It doesn't feel like progress.
The idea that recycling, or some forms of it, could be a waste of time is so heretical that one hardly dares think it, let alone say it. But is that unthinking obedience healthy? Should we be asking tougher questions of the high priests of this new religion?
Take those empty wine bottles, the ones I put in my green box, along with the newspapers. The newspapers I understand. They will come back, theoretically anyway, as other newspapers, made from recycled paper.
But how many of the wine bottles will come back as wine bottles? Most of them originated in France, so the idea of smashing them, recycling the glass into new bottles, then transporting them across the Channel to a grateful vineyard owner in Burgundy or the Languedoc seems optimistic, at an economic level.
But, none the less, the drive to recycle more and more bottles continues apace. The great thing about glass, we are told, is that it can be recycled indefinitely. Less carbon dioxide is produced when making glass from recycled containers than when making it from scratch; 315 kg of CO2, according to official figures, are saved for every tonne of glass melted.
In environmental terms, it is a no-brainer. Or is it? To a layman like me, happy to recycle my rubbish but not always sure about the scientific rationale for doing so, there is such a blizzard of facts and figures swirling around the subject that it is hard to know which ones are really relevant.
One oft-quoted statistic is that the glass recycled in the U.K. every year saves enough energy to launch 10 space shuttle missions. But who wants to launch 10 space shuttle missions? I am not washing bottles and getting up at six in the morning just so some geek in a space suit can loop the loop around the Moon.
On average, according to another statistic, each household in the U.K. uses 331 glass bottles and jars a year; recycling rather than dumping them would save enough energy to power a computer for five days. That's a bit better. That I can relate to. Wouldn't want the old computer packing up because I hadn't put my bottles out.
But, again, do we need to have as many computers as we do? Aren’t they an environmental extravagance? Shakespeare used a quill and didn't leave a carbon footprint in his life.
Here’s another easy-to-grasp statistic from the recycling-for-idiots manual: recycling two wine bottles saves enough energy to boil water for five cups of tea. But wait! I don’t drink tea. Can’t stand it. Does that mean that, by not boiling the kettle for tea, I’m saving enough energy not to have to recycle the wine bottles?
There's so much hidden moralising in this arcane world, so much telling people what they ‘ought’ to be doing, that we sometimes tie ourselves in knots, salving our consciences without, at a practical level, doing anything particularly useful for the environment.
With glass, one of the big problems is the imbalance between the different colours. Historically, the U.K. imports twice as much green glass – the kind found in wine bottles – as it manufactures. So when the recycled green glass, or cullet, emerges from the processing plants, the question arises of what to do with it. Not all of it can be recycled as bottles (although mine, I was gratified to discover, does – see below). A lot of it used to end up as ashtrays, but that is hardly a boom market these days.
Increasingly, green cullet is used for aggregate in the construction industry and, in particular, the new road-laying material glasphalt, 30 per cent of which is recycled glass. An estimated 14 million crushed bottles were used during a recent construction project on the M6.
A glorious example of recycling in action? Or just another overcrowded British road spewing toxic fumes into the air? I thought we were all supposed to be going around on bikes.
With the Government committed to recycling more glass year on year to meet E.U. targets, that is going to mean more glasphalt, meaning more roads, and an industrial cycle that may make a kind of economic sense but is light years from those touchy-feely concerns that first made people feel passionate about the environment: deforestation, climate change, saving baby seals from being clubbed to death, and so on.
The single most important thing, you could argue, is the forming of good habits. Civilised societies in the 21st Century husband the resources of the natural world responsibly. If that means bleary-eyed citizens in dressing gowns having to behave like trained chimpanzees, so be it.
But even among recycling professionals, there is an acknowledgment that, while the war must continue, some battles are more worth fighting than others.
“I do wonder about glass,” says Martin Stott, head of environment and waste at Warwickshire County Council. “The environmental benefits are relatively modest compared with the costs. People can relate to recycled paper, with fewer trees being cut down. But with glass bottles, a lot of which are going to end up paving roads, there is not that emotional satisfaction.”
One obvious nonsense, says Stott, is that while millions of householders put out their bottles for recycling, most pubs and clubs don’t: an estimated 80 per cent of their bottles go into landfill.
“There is a disconnect between what people do in their homes and what they see commercial businesses doing. It is the same with restaurants and food waste.”
So should I bother putting out my bottles?
“Of course you should,” says Stott. “What’s the alternative to recycling them? More and more expensive landfill? Simply saving energy by not making new bottles from scratch makes the game worth the candle.
“But there needs to be some strategic fine-tuning by the Government. Kitchen waste, for example, is deemed too expensive to collect, yet there is much more potential for productive recycling there than with glass. Instead of just slavishly doing what we are told, we should have an informed debate about what the real priorities are in recycling.”
Amen to that. I’ll do what I'm told. I always do. I just wish I had a clearer idea of why I’m doing what I’m doing. And I bet millions of others feel the same.
Facts and figures from the world of glass:
- Glass accounts for 7% – 8% of the waste in the average dustbin.
- There are now more than 20,000 bottle bank sites in the U.K., but only 34 per cent of households benefit from kerbside recycling. Where there is kerbside recycling, the amount of glass recycled doubles.
- In 2001, the U.K. recycled about 630,000 tonnes of glass – about a third. This proportion has to rise to around 71% by the end of this year to meet the E.U. packaging directive.
The afterlife of an Oxford wine bottle:
- After their contents have been consumed by the Davidson household, empty wine bottles are washed and put in a green box with other items of glass (such as jars), newspapers, and magazines.
- On alternate Tuesday mornings, the green box is collected by bin men, who separate the glass from the newspapers, etc. and take it to the Cowley Marsh depot, where it is put into large containers, or ‘stillages’.
- The glass is collected by Thamesdown Recycling in Swindon, which colour-sorts it into green, white, brown, and mixed.
- The glass is then bulked and transported to Berryman Glass in South Kirkby, West Yorkshire, one of the country’s oldest glass-recycling businesses, established in 1922.
- At Berryman, the green glass is processed to become furnace-ready cullet suitable for re-melting. The processing entails the gradual removal of extraneous material, such as ferrous metal, pieces of ceramic and lead glass, until the purity of virgin glass is reproduced.
- The cullet then goes to Ardagh Glass in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, where it is recast into green bottles and jars, both for domestic consumption and for export.
“The good news,” says Mick Keogh, general manager of Berryman Glass in West Yorkshire, “Is that the green bottle you have left out for your bin men in Oxford comes back as another green bottle. And that recycling process can be repeated indefinitely. The bad news is that not all recycled glass fits into that neat pattern.”
One of the problems with kerbside collection, according to Keogh, is that although more and more waste is being collected, different kinds of waste can contaminate each other to the point that efficient recycling becomes all but impossible.
In the case of glass, so much crockery sometimes gets mixed in with the glass that by the time the glass reaches Berryman it is so contaminated that it can only be recycled as aggregate. That lower-grade glass may only be the smaller proportion of the whole, but it is a rapidly increasing proportion.
It’s a frustration when there are other, more environmentally-friendly markets for recycled glass, such as new container glass production and glass-fibre insulation material.
Although the U.K. imports far more green glass than it produces domestically, there are still export markets for good-quality recycled green glass from the U.K.
“The onus is on councils and waste management companies to sort their waste with care,” says Keogh. “If they take short cuts anywhere in the chain, either at the point of collection or at the material reclamation facilities [M.R.F’s], they will reduce the amount of glass that can be genuinely and environmentally recycled as glass. We are doing better than we used to, but we are still lagging behind other parts of Europe.”
In the U.K., only between 50% and 60% of glass is recycled, while the average European rate is more than 80%. Bottle banks have been around for more than 30 years, but we have never really embraced them with the same enthusiasm as our continental neighbours. Here the ratio of bottle banks per head of population is 1:2,640. In Europe, it is 1:1,250.
In other words, as a nation we are still wedded to landfill. A staggering 14 million glass bottles and jars end up there every day and Berryman’s Keogh says that figure is far too high.
“The amount of glass we put into landfill is going to fall quite steeply,” he predicts. “It will have to if we are going to meet our obligations under E.U. legislation. But we can still do more to ensure that as much glass as possible is recycled to best advantage.”
www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/05/31/earecyc131.xm...
Further information about recycling glass can be found at www.wasteonline.org.uk and www.recycle-more.co.uk