This week, Muriel Garland – chair of Zero Waste Mann – explains how simple it can be for us all to make a difference
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Please don’t put aluminium cans, aerosols, bottles or batteries in your wheelie bin. Recycle them.
A recent visit to the incinerator reminded me that we need to do more to explain the concept of zero waste.
Here at Zero Waste Mann, we’ve been trying to get the message over for 13 years – but looking at the pit full of ‘rubbish’ at Richmond Hill incinerator, I realised that people are still putting aluminium cans, bottles and cardboard in their wheelie bins. Some people just don’t get it.
As our host Jon Garrad, operations manager at SITA, explained, they don’t want any cans and bottles because those items don’t burn – and they could cause problems for the machinery. All your cans, aerosols and bottles should be recycled. It’s easy to do through the kerbside boxes or the communal bring banks.
Committee members of Zero Waste Mann were invited to tour the incinerator after I had queried the amount of electricity that was being produced, and the length of time taken for maintenance during a recent shut-down.
We had a very thorough two-hour visit with Jon and two members of the SITA team, who explained things clearly and answered all our questions.
As a company, SITA is heavily involved with recycling in other places. They run more than 100 household waste centres (civic amenity sites) and have more than 20 years experience collecting recycling and waste from residents in the UK. In the Isle of Man, they receive and store all the paper from the kerbside collections before it is shipped off to England for recycling. They are very supportive of recycling generally.
So, how can we explain Zero Waste more clearly? Well, the basic idea is that we are using up the world’s natural resources too quickly – and we should be taking better care of our planet. We could, and should, be much less wasteful and more efficient in our use of resources.
We’re not just talking about wood and steel and glass, but about all the materials we use every day. Waste just doesn’t make commercial or environmental sense.
Getting to a position where we have absolutely no waste seems like Utopia – but it’s a great target to have. Becoming a Zero Waste Island is now part of our government’s waste strategy.
Waste is defined as something you don’t want. But that doesn’t mean somebody else couldn’t make good use of it. You only have to see how much goes to our local charity shops to realise the truth there.
It makes more sense to pass ‘stuff’ on to other people who can get more use out of it. At the same time, charities are able to make some money from our waste.
So we’ve got part of the message. We can see how other people could use our old furniture or clothes. But it seems that most people don’t yet see steel and aluminium and wood and glass as valuable resources, which should be retained within the loop.
But aluminium cans take a lot of energy to produce, and can easily be recycled. It doesn’t make any sense to put them in your wheelie bin and send them to be put through the incinerator. Aluminium cans, steel tins and aerosols can all be placed in your kerbside box or in the bring banks. They will be sent across to England for recycling.
Batteries can be recycled, too. They can be taken to any branch of the Manx Co-Op, or to the Green Centre opposite Iceland in Douglas (open Saturday 10am-4pm and Wednesday 10am-2pm). In Europe, any shop that sells batteries is obliged to take them back and send them away for recycling. Unfortunately we don’t have that law here on the island (yet) – but the government does enable old batteries, including hearing aid batteries, to be shipped away and recycled.
Cardboard can be taken to any civic amenity site for recycling. Unfortunately, the Eastern site in Middle River and the one at St John’s were designed the wrong way round – so you come to the skips first and the temptation is to throw everything in there.
A more logical design is to have the re-use and recycling containers first, and then the skips. But when you drive down the ramp at the far side at Douglas and St John’s, you will see a container for collecting cardboard packaging. Please use it.
The layout of the civic amenity site in the north is more logical. There, the re-use and recycling come before the skips.
The concept of zero waste has been around since the 1970’s, when Dr Paul Palmer started a company named Zero Waste Systems for recycling chemicals. If you Google ‘zero waste’ these days, you’ll come up with hundreds of articles on the subject. Our charity, Zero Waste Mann, was actually inspired by a speaker from Australia who came to Onchan to give a talk in 2000.
After 13 years, it’s disappointing to realise that we haven’t been able to get our message across to everybody in the island. And that’s why I thought I would write this column to spell out the ABC of Zero Waste.
Please recycle your aluminium cans and aerosols, batteries and cardboard.
And please make sure you are doing everything in the waste hierarchy before you start sending ‘stuff’ off to be burnt.
Our order of priority should be:
Avoid creating waste
Reduce the amount of waste you make
Re-use as much as you can
Recycle as far as possible
Make compost from food and garden waste
Incinerate through wheelie bin or skips
Landfill
Once you get your head round ‘zero waste’ you’ll never look at things in the same way again.
It should be as simple as ABC!
www.zerowastemann.org