Vocal Voices

Next week, 16-22 May, around 151,000 households, 96 MPs, and 4,180 classrooms will be tallying up each piece of plastic they use. They will monitor everything they use in 19 categories and sort it into whether it goes to recycling or general waste. It has been a long time coming, but better late than never. It will be interesting to see the results.

My only little gripe is that these people, who had to sign up voluntarily, will already be the ones doing their bit so the result will be skewed slightly. Having said that it will still give us an insight into how well or how badly we are doing - I suspect pretty badly. Whether it will bring in new strategies about how we deal with plastic waste is another thing. The country needs a unified approach not the piecemeal one council doing this another council doing that systems of today. It needs to be made simple and easy to do - we have the technology but not the desire.

I didn't sign up as I am not in the "normal" range. I live alone in a seven room property. My green bin takes just about everything except bubble wrap, black plastic, shredded paper and glass. It should be collected every other week but in my case it only gets put out every six weeks, even then is only half full but that is with me religiously sorting plastic.

All those kids are going to suffer before they die or die from climate change directly; recycling plastic is not going to do a damned thing about it. I've said this before but everyone seems to think recycling is inextricably linked with climate change. It isn't. The worst thing they can actually do is recycle this plastic into fuel and burn it. Yet that is a big move with plastics recycling. As it is, the carbon is locked into the plastic for an interminable time. Bury it, deep.

I'm even less interested in the mania with recycling, whilst ignoring the fact that every drive in a fossil burning vehicle is another nail in our, the humans, coffin; than you are in my St Elon posts.It is a distraction and a misdirection from the real problem. Waste won't kill us. Climate will.

So I ignore them.

Recycling is not so much about climate, not that it was mentioned, and although it uses energy to do it it is not as much as the refining of raw materials and the production of virgin materials for more "new" things. It is actually quite a big energy saving and most energy is still produced from fossil fuels.

It is equally about resources and the environment as anything else. The more we recycle the less new raw materials are needed, and each item we recycle is one less to be dumped at the side of the road or in a lake, river or the sea to become a hazard to wildlife and, ultimately, to us. Billions of tonnes are ending up in our rivers and in the oceans' gyres. When some of this stuff turns into micro-plastic it ends up in the food chain. Its effects are not to be brushed aside.

Burning it is a bit simplistic, I agree. Even though plastics are more energy dense than coal and can be used to produce electricity and heating burning them can also produce toxins such as dioxins. Such action is now falling out of favour as pyrolysis and gasification take over.

However, plastics are a valuable resource and we would be mad to just bury them when we can use them over and over. It is not something that would ever be considered for metals such as steel, aluminium, copper for example, but, hey, plastics are only plastic.

When I go to the check out at Tesco there is a small stand which is always kept full of new plastic bags for sale to shoppers.
I always take one canvas bag and one leather bag. I also have several plastic bags which I re-use. I never have to buy a new plastic bag.

I put plastic sheet from the top of conainers, bubble wrap small plastic bags into a large plastic bag. When this is full I take it to Tesco
who have a large wire mesh cage for this. THey also have a container for old batteries, printing ink carttridges etc. Very useful.