Coronavirus has interrupted just about every single part of every day life.
Many of us are working from home, kids aren’t at school, gyms are shut and the queue for every supermarket is bigger than the scramble for the now-cancelled Glastonbury. And now, recycling services have ceased up and down the country.
In order to make up for a much reduced workforce, refuse companies are concentrating on household waste disposal and hitting pause on recycling. It’s totally understandable; with so many people off sick, companies are spread thin and refuse collectors are already laying their health on the line by collecting our bins as it is.
But one wonders just how damaging this complete recycling reversal is going to be to our still-backwards approach to waste reduction.
Flytipping waste has rocketed by 300% over the past month, with families dumping clothes, household waste and furniture wherever they can. Type in ‘waste increase’ to Google and your news feed is inundated with local papers bemoaning the wave of trash disposed at roadsides everywhere from Liverpool to London.
It’s not just that flytipping is an anti-social eyesore; this cessation of recycling is going to have a massive impact on our environment and the materials we rely on.
Take cardboard, for example.
Cardboard boxes are made from recycled materials and without paper getting recycled, the production of cardboard may slow down. The Recycling Association has voiced concerns about a looming European shortage of fibre (used paper and cardboard) which goes into making the millions of cardboard boxes we need for food and medical supplies distribution.
Households are receiving more paper fibre than ever with home delivery numbers skyrocketing but those Amazon envelopes and hamper boxes are going straight to landfill rather than to recycling points which can reuse them.
So desperate are people to get rid of their rubbish that there have been a number of incidents involving large fires. Wigan Today reported that local fire crews had been called out to 14 separate fires involving household waste in the past few weeks. Not only are these fires illegal and potentially dangerous should they spiral out of control, but burning non-organic items is catastrophically polluting.
Burn some plastic – like plastic bags and synthetic clothing – and you start releasing toxic gases like dioxins, furans and BCPs into the atmosphere which pose a risk to human, animal and vegetable life.
And then, of course, we come to the crux of the matter: we can’t keep sticking rubbish in landfill.
We recycle slightly less today (45%) than we did in 2017 (45.5%), despite the fact that environmental issues are more of a thing today with Fridays for Futures and Extinction Rebellion.
Give that there are nearly 28 million households in the UK currently recycling nothing, just where exactly is all this waste going to go? It takes a month for paper towel to degrade in landfill, and up to three years for plywood to rot. Those plastic bags you continue to take from supermarkets? 20 years each. Disposable nappies are believed to take 450 years to break down.
It’s all very nice to see people posting about nature bouncing back now that humans are staying in doors, but while wildlife may be flocking back to urban green spaces, we’re pumping more crap into the ground than ever.
Look at all the amphora (ceramic containers from the Neolithic period) or glass bottles found from 17th century shipwrecks – they’re all in tact and they were abandoned thousands of years ago. We haven’t even started to see those materials degrade yet. It’s beggars imagination that months’ worth of beer cans, wine bottles and tomato tins are going to simply be dumped.
So what can we do now to reduce the amount of stuff we’re chucking away?
First off, these are difficult times and we can’t get everything right at the moment – we can only do our best with the resources we have to hand. A lone parent looking after an infant during lockdown may not have the time, money or support to switch from disposable nappies to reusable diapers. But there are little things the rest of us can do.
Save your cardboard
If you’ve got the space, just collapse your boxes and envelopes and hold onto your cardboard and paper until this is over. If you have a cat of course, a box is more welcome than a jungle gym.
Create a window ledge garden from cans, jars and bottles
Don’t have access to an outdoor garden? Why not fill your cans and jars with a little soil and get planting herbs and shallow plants? You can grow little avocado plants by sticking them on top of small bottles filled with water (not soil) – which can be fun. And of course, wine bottles can be useful vases for daffodils and tulips.
Don’t chuck out your vegetables
If you have a garden, get a compost heap going. Collect all your vegetable peelings, coffee grounds and eggshells and allow to rot in a corner of the garden. Home-made compost is fantastic for nourishing the soil. Don’t have a garden? Check to see if there are any community gardens near you that are still running and donate your bags of peelings to them if they are.
Cut back on the internet shopping
It’s so tempting to spend a stack of cash on Amazon right now – post is a real highlight when you can’t go out. But just take a minute to consider how much you really want whatever it is you’re thinking of buying. Can you get it at your local corner shop? Is it worth waiting days for? Cutting down on internet shopping may be good for both your wallet and the environment.
Repurpose envelopes
If you’ve received a load of post recently, why not forward on the joy by sending something to a friend or family member you can’t see right now? That way, every envelope or bubble-wrap bag gets a second life and someone gets a nice surprise.
Save the big clearout until lockdown’s finished
It’s tempting to do a massive Marie Kondo right now but lockdown really isn’t the time to clear out every cupboard in your house. By all means, scrub your curtains, wash your windows, hoover the floors but don’t chuck out lots of things because there’s nowhere to put it right now. Save that decluttering session for once this is all over. In the meantime, why not give these quick cleaning jobs a go?
Turn fabrics into scrubs for the NHS
Right now, the NHS needs all the help it can get and you can support it by making scrubs, washbags and headbands for hospitals, hospices and care homes. You can turn old pillowcases and clothing into material which can then be fashioned into useful items. The fabric has to be able to stand a 60 degree wash. Check to see if your local NHS trust is recruiting for sewers.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/11/waste-300-thanks-covid-19-something-address-12543313/?ITO=squid
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