Archive for December, 2010

What a Waste!

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

[To Scorpiosail Home Page]

Using waste, Swedish city Kristianstad stops its fossil fuel use, according to NY Times. But not by substituting old technologies by solar or wind, instead it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines!

Having spent much of the past 18 years in the developing world and seen an enormous amount of garbage, I think that re-use of trash might be one of the most over looked strategies for a more environmentally sustainable change. Garbage recovery slows climate change, reduces the burden on landfill sites and saves raw material resources.

Unfortunately people in most developing countries show, in general, absolutely no interest in keeping their neighbourhoods clean and tidy. Trash is literally thrown out of the windows on one’s own back yards.

There has to be an incentive for recycling. When I was a kid in the 1950-60’s, paper recovery was an enormously popular hobby. We ran around the town collecting piles of used newspapers. Everybody participated, particularly kids and housewives. You got paid per kilo and when you had enough reward coupons you could claim your rewards. The English Meccano engineering toy kits were particularly popular among us boys, but there were much else on the price list, things like watches, dolls etc.


The Meccano. Image sources: eng-tips.com and waveneyvalleyblog.com

A Finnish ad for paper collecting

Image source: paperinkerays.fi

Why couldn’t a similar program be successful today, when some cities are almost drowning in litter? I doubt that even China has any national garbage recovery scheme, but I hope I’m wrong.

Plastic, bottles and metal cans are the most depressing items. In Finland I think almost 100% of cans and bottles (glass and plastic) are recycled. That’s because there is a relatively high deposit on these. Here in Phuket, Thailand, were people mostly drink bottled water, there must be millions of small plastic bottles consumed every year. They all end up in the dump, but worse, a large number is just thrown away on the streets and on the beaches.


Image source: swamplot.com

I guess landfills in the developed world are in general well run operations. However, landfills are the oldest form of organised rubbish disposal and a terrible waste (ha-ha) and should be decreased by waste reduction and particularly recycling. Problem with the developing world is that a large amount of the trash doesn’t even reach the dump and even the part that is brought there is not separated.


Image source: on.ec.gc.ca

In the Bay Islands of Honduras we saw trash being loaded onto a large barge, which was then towed about one cable length (less than 200 metres) from shore and all trash was dumped in the water above the pristine coral reefs – one of the best diving locations of the world. Bahia de Caraques, a town in Ecuador, calls itself the Eco City because it has two kinds of trash bins. They are of different colours, one yellow and one green. We were never able to find out what the rules were and we never saw anybody separate anything. However, we put our organic waste in the green and plastic, cans and bottles in the yellow – until we one day saw the pick up by the garbage truck: both bins were emptied in one heap on the platform.

I remember the father of one of my old friends, a wealthy man, whose hobby was to collect empty bottles in the parks of Helsinki. He always carried a plastic bag in his pocket in case he would come upon a thrown-away bottle anywhere. All the proceeds of this hobby he donated to his badminton club, and over the years the donation grew to a considerable amount. He could easily just have written a check, but the recycling aspect made the whole project more rewarding for him. (But I’m sure he wrote those checks also.)

Recycling is educational. When people have the incentive to participate they will gradually clean up their micro-environment and realize that is a win-win activity, helping to save the world. And I wonder how many boys were inspired to take up technical careers because of the Meccano set they earned by collecting paper for recycling?