Sep

Waste And Recycling – Beyond The Bin

We’ve been doing a bit of decluttering lately. One of the items that we needed to dispose of was an old and broken PC tower. We were able to sell the old telly, but rescuing the PC tower was beyond our expertise.

I did a bit of research and came across a Planet Arc website called Recycling Near You, that provided locations for recycling e-waste. Your local council should also provide advice as to where you can recycle e-waste including monitors, TV’s, mobile phones and batteries etc.

My endeavour to recycle one PC tower took me on a journey of discovery regarding the waste disposal management of our local region.

It’s been a while since the PC broke, so I can’t remember what went wrong, but I know that of all the parts, it was only one that broke. I was sure that this part could be replaced and the PC given a second life. So we took it down to our local Computer Recycler, found on the Planet Arc website.

I was wrong in my assumption. The fella at the shop told me that it was not worth the bother to recycle the parts or the casing, he just gave it to the council for them to dump.

I’ve mentioned before my growing concern with the amount that we waste. You can image that after trying to recycle properly, I was a bit perturbed at being told it was in vain.

So I rang our local council. I wanted to get to the bottom of this. What do they do with e-waste? The news was both good and bad. Good, that they don’t just dump old PCs etc, they send it to a metal business to recover and melt down the metals such as the silver, gold and nickel used in the manufacture. Bad, because then they dump the rest.

Surely it seems a much better option to reuse the parts as they are rather than dump it. Not everyone wants a state of the art PC, and the case is perfectly fine, even if the parts aren’t!

The interesting thing is that while I was on hold at the council, a bulletin came across informing me that our local region’s landfill will reach capacity in less than five years, and the council are now calling for resident’s input into ways to reduce waste. The council website has a lot of information about recycling in the area, waste management strategies and a proposal for future planning. And an online survey. What do I think we could do to reduce our waste?

I had one idea.

Why reduce waste

Whose responsibility is our waste management? Once our garbage goes into the bin, it’s becomes a matter of out of sight, out of mind for most of us. We think of it as someone else’s responsibility – like the council’s. But we are each contributing to a growing problem and the responsibility I think, lies at least in part with us.

It’s our own backyards so to speak, that this waste is ending up in. It’s deforested areas. It’s potential farmland. And the problem isn’t just at the end of the consumer cycle – disposal of an end product, there is all the waste in between from extracting resources, manufacture, packaging, as well as final disposal. Somewhere over the last 60 odd years, we developed a throw away mentality. It’s time to reverse that trend.

How to reduce waste.

1. Consume less

Waste reduction begins at consumption. There’s an ad on the telly at the moment that really makes my blood boil. It’s for McCain’s baby vegies, (if you remember those awful baby cooing noises the actors are doing over a bowl of peas!). Each portion of peas are individually wrapped for your convenience. So you have several plastic bags inside another plastic bag, which most of us put into yet another plastic (shopping) bag – all of which end up in the bin.

Choosing less wasteful options at the supermarket, will reduce waste. Consider the packaging before buying, choose products with less, no or recyclable packaging, take your own bags, shop at markets where food and goods aren’t all wrapped in plastic.

2. Reuse what you can

Reusing things keeps them out of the waste cycle. Reusing items may be a simple as refashioning an old container for a new purpose, or buying second hand.

I’ve written about Gomi Style before – a movement aimed at creatively reusing ‘waste’. As per their manifesto, their philosophy is to

“…strive to give renewed life and purpose to existing materials and technologies, so it is obviously pro-recycle and pre-cycle, but it is not anti-consumer. GOMI materials were consumer goods – perhaps they’re past their obvious prime, but still useful and viable to the creative eye.”

Check out their videos for some creative recycling ideas.

3. Recycle everything else

Recycling is great, but it’s not the best option. To recycle our waste uses a lot of energy and resources. And as my experience with our local council shows, our best recycling intentions aren’t necessarily being followed through by our authorities. But recycling is better than landfill! If you’re not sure what or how to recycle, get onto your local council and find out about their services and recommendations. If you feel that they aren’t doing enough in the way of recycling, then have your say. We often have the loudest voice at local council level.

If you’re interested in looking further into the consumption cycle and waste management, there’s a fantastic video by Annie Leonard called The Story of Stuff which takes us from extraction to disposal and examines the trends and effects of our consumption. Apart from the video, there’s a whole heap of resources on the site as well.