We should be recycling less!
People are inherently lazy, so here are a few reasons I have heard for not recycling:
1. It takes up too much time and space
2. The council just throws it all in landfill anyway
3. Global warming - it's just a load of b****cks
Taking them one by one:
1. Yep, it is time and space greedy. At the moment, I have two dustbins full of tetra packs; one dustbin full of shoes; a big green wheelie bin half-full of waste food, cardboard and shredded paper; a tower of newspapers four feet high and three small recycling bags full to the brim with bottles, cardboard and squashed tins.
The sheer quantity of it does drive me bananas!! But I don’t mind doing it. It makes me feel good. I have a sense of achievement after I’ve sorted it all into the various bins and boxes. Feeling good is good for you.
2. I don’t know about this one. Some of it might end up in landfill, and it really shouldn’t. But if even some of it gets properly recycled (and it certainly does), that’s good.
3. You'll always get the sceptics. Another comment I’ve come across more than once is: 'They try to scare us with all this global warming but it's just the world going through its natural cycle.' I think they’re both wrong. Besides I don't think that's the point. Whether global warming is happening or not, it really isn't the point.
The point surely is that we need to reduce the amount of waste we produce and reduce the amount of energy we squander.
I think the 20th century will be remembered in future centuries as the century of obscene consumption; the century when most of the world's resources were squandered. This century is going to be different - because it has to be. Not just because we'll run out of all those resources, but also because the mood will change. That way of existence is too exhausting.
Sometimes I think humanity is like a rampant cancer, eating away at the world; run mad - like cancerous cells multiplying too fast and threatening to destroy their host. But that's just me being fanciful.
Back to the point: Reducing our carbon footprint is surely the point. And that means firstly recycling, but ultimately drammatically cutting the waste we produce in the first place.
We have to stop producing so much rubbish. Less packaging, less throwaway culture, less print, less energy consumption, more patching up, more mending, more writing on the back of an envelope.
So, recycling? Yes, do it. It helps. But it has to be so much more - there needs to be a seismic cultural shift away from producing the waste that needs recycling in the first place.
Take the Elizabethans - I've been reading Bill Bryson's Shakespeare. He writes about archived records from Elizabethan times - almost impossible to decipher, because they are written in cramped hand-writing, with no new paragraphs, no white space, writing in the margins, sometimes written over, horizontally, across the text to use up more space. Paper was an expensive commodity then and used sparingly. Nowadays paper is cheap. Its price doesn't take into account its cost.
I Googled 'waste paper' and 'recycling' and various other green words and there are reams of pages out there on how to reduce your carbon footprint. I'm not going to have much of an impact on anyone else's, so I'm going to focus on my own.
At the moment, our household's waste production per fortnight is as follows:
1 black wheelie bin full of rubbish (could be better)
1 green wheelie bin full of compostable stuff (okay)
2 recycling boxes-worth of glass, plastic and metal (could be better)
1-2 recycling box-worth of paper (could be better)
too much electricity
too many short car journeys
My new year's resolution is to try to cut this down.
