The Wombles did it all first of course. The little pointy-nosed, furry creatures realised that the best thing to do with all our rubbish was to reuse it, and spent their time collecting the things that humans had left on Wimbledon common.
“Make good use of bad rubbish” may have been coined by the Wombles’s creator, Elisabeth Beresford, over 40 years ago but it is arguably even more relevant now as the UK faces a waste crisis.
As Margaret Eaton of the Local Government Association says: “Britain is the dustbin of Europe, with more rubbish thrown into landfill than almost any other country.”
In Wales, it is estimated that the 15 landfill sites in the country will become full within eight years. More importantly though, the thousands of tonnes of rotting rubbish that already sits in landfill sites produce methane which is 23 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.
Evidently landfill should no longer be used, but what are the alternatives?
Incinerators
One option is to use incinerators. Applying thermal treatment to waste can reduce its volume by 90 per cent and weight by 60 per cent and uses less space than landfill. The heat and gas that is released during the process can be used to produce electricity.
However, this technology is still very inefficient. Equally, the dioxins produced from the treatment cause acid rain and the toxic ash created by the process still needs to be put into a landfill site.
This has meant that there has been protests against various projects in Wales, most recently the proposed facility at Trident Park in Cardiff Bay. Paul Redding, an expert in environmental waste management and a lecturer at the University of Wales in Cardiff (UWIC), says that the “spectre of cancer” from airborne particles scares people.
Incinerators also tend to be private projects so the developers try to ensure that a certain amount of waste is produced. Creating a demand for waste is certainly not the way forward.
Put simply, incinerators are the worst waste disposal option for the environment.
Anaerobic Digesters
Another option is to use anaerobic digesters. These use bacteria to process organic matter such as paper, food, compost and wastewater. The gas and liquor produced can be used to make electricity, or as transport fuel and fertilizer.
Anaerobic digesters are effective, as Kevin Monson, Sandra Esteves and Alan Guwy from the University of Glamorgan, concluded in their review of the technology in 2007: “Barriers to further implementation [of anaerobic digesters] in the UK are policy-related rather than technical.”
But even if policy was changed, anaerobic digesters are not able to process all the waste that an average household produces, let alone the industrial waste that often goes to landfill.
Towards zero-waste
The best thing to do therefore has to be to produce less waste to ensure that expensive and potentially harming methods of disposal are used less.
This has already been tried with much success in St Arvans, a small village in Monmouthshire. St Arvans’s zero-waste pilot scheme was launched in June 2007 and items such as batteries and ash were sorted into separate boxes by the residents at source and collected by an independent organisation called Monmouthshire Community Recycling.
Lou Summers, who was involved from the very beginning, said that few things couldn’t be recycled: “The only thing they were just looking at, in the end, was soft plastics. Everything else was taken away.”
Critically, Lou says that her family also began “pre-cycling” – buying products that used less packaging. With everyone in the village doing the same, they would have been able to continue diverting 77 per cent of their residual waste to be recycled. This translated as St Arvans’ residents saving 43 trees every month.
However, the scheme has been cancelled because of the cost and Monmouthshire Community Recycling ceased to exist on 27 November 2009. The council said that the binmen could do the recycling instead.
So what now?
Investment in new technologies is needed, but the main focus should be on reducing waste. The wombles of St Arvans have demonstrated that “zero-waste” should be an attainable goal if the government was willing to fund other projects.
Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, has backed alternative waste disposal methods, saying: “We must … only landfill things that have absolutely no other use.”
However, although responsibility for the effective disposal of waste lies partly with the government and councils, it also lies with all of us to buy goods with less packaging and recycle everything we can.
