Recycling is Rubbish by Ben Westwood

For the past three years I have been trying to organise effective recycling within our company. I have found out, this seems to be a pretty impossible task to achieve.

Even though the general waste & the recycling bins are clearly marked & positioned around the studio, I constantly find unseparated waste in all of them. “Clean the food off of the plastic containers, don’t just trash it because you haven’t” merely falls on deaf ears.

I have sent in house e-mails & stuck notices around the building but 3 years down the line the problems are still the same.

The recycling bins outside where I live also continuously suffer the same complaints.

It seems that without some kind of reward or disciplinary treatment, people generally are not very interested in recycling; the proposed solution by local councils to this at the moment is to just burn all unrecycled waste in ‘Waste to Energy’ facilities.

But who is to blame? Where is the problem created in the first place?

Just look on the shelves of any supermarket. Packaging! Packaging! Packaging! Disposable plastic everywhere! – Why not prevent all this waste from being made in the first place?

I have done some research and came across the ‘Zero Waste’ philosophy which reminded me that when I was a child in the 60’s & 70’s most drinks came in glass bottles that had a refund paid on their return for re-use which we were always diligent to collect.

Also ‘Rag & Bone’ Men would come in a horse & cart around to the streets where we lived, ringing a bell. Anything we had to recycle was taken out to them & a fixed rate was paid back to us depending on what we had. Money being in short supply, everything possible was recycled (I have heard a saying that the best recyclers are either very poor or very rich).

“Zero waste” philosophy is to design environmentally friendly products, to reduce materials where and whenever possible; to use re-usable, reparable, more benign materials. Materials that that have a longer life cycle and that are not thrown aside and burnt after one time use and consumption.

Recycling – a word that carries a positive connotation – unfortunately is not the solution.
It uses a lot of energy which creates pollution in itself & it still does not deal with the bulk of our waste.

We need to stop making disposable goods!

Needless to say that without a public & political change we will see no improvements.
& Big business has to come to its senses!