Rubbish, rubbish, everywhere.
Back in the 1970s, if something was made from plastic, it was good quality and made from the same materials that space ships would be made from. That was exciting and we wanted lots of it! There were things made from expensive, high quality plastics that revolutionised the world. There was to be the single use plastics too, that changed the world in ways we couldn't have imagined. Imagine healthcare without single use plastic supplies and PPE. Imagine HIV/AIDS had we not had materials to make single use condoms so cheaply available. But there was also literal mountains of cheap, flimsy plastic toys, household goods and even parts for cars, airplanes and space craft, that rapidly found itself condemned to landfill.
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) have stated that basically 100% of all plastics ever created are still in existence.
The fact is that much plastic can be recycled, but that process itself is one that uses large amounts of energy, creates dangerous gases and therefore may not be any better than the landfill option.
There's more to landfill than meets the eye. Having grown up around the first landfill sites within residential areas of the UK, seeing the effects on the people and the various responses and proposals, this is how I came to accept the solution of "zero waste" and decided it to be the most immediate, urgent and positive thing we can all work towards, in order to try and save something for our children and grandchildren'.
How we lived 50 years ago.
Before we decided to cram the Earth with several layers of rubbish, fill the deserts and oceans with rubbish and even outer space, repurposing was actually a really big thing. Everything was just more expensive so nothing was wasted...not even packaging. Food, household goods, clothes..whatever... everything is so much more plentiful now. If something came in a plastic tub, that would NOT have been thrown away. I remember the wood effect Sainsbury's golden syrup tub that accompanied our family through several decades of bathtimes, washing parents, children's and the dogs hair. Many people will remember taking sandwiches to school in an ice cream tub like this one.
All of a sudden there was so much more rubbish. Throwaway culture had arrived. Disposable nappies. Throwing a nappy away after one use was unthinkable to us. Understandable though, with the demands on time of the dual income family, that the convenience of disposables would be popular. But when you consider 2.5 billion nappies go to landfill in the UK every year...eek!! In the far East, it's uncommon for children to wear nappies and I will confess to having used this technique with my own kids. In China it's common to see young children wearing clothes with a slit in the bottom area. Parents, or more frequently grandparents, hold them by the legs with their back against their own body and they do what they do, ideally into the drains. I would hold them either over a toilet or a drain, depending where we were and I see that this is a practice starting to catch on in the West now. With the economy as it is, no doubt that's a hefty saving on horrible plastic that gives your child a painful rash and is a huge part of the rubbish clogging up the Earth. It's surprising how smoothly toilet training goes using this technique too.
Our traveling rubbish.
I do some voluntary litter picking and the amount of plastic bottles always amazes me. Litter begets litter. Where it's lying around on the floor, others will have no second thoughts about dropping more. But what litterbugs don't seem to be able to grasp is how rubbish doesn't stay where it's dropped. National Geographic scientists found plastic coming from Russia, the United States, Europe, South America, Japan and China on Henderson island. That's an uninhabited, isolated atoll, halfway between Chile and New Zealand. Then there's all the rubbish we actively ship overseas, because it's economically more viable to ship it around the planet, than dealing with it here. If you've not seen the rubbish barges shipping the discarded evidence of privelige away, here's one just for you.
It makes its way into waterways and flows downstream, finding it's way to the sea. Eventually it gets picked up by rotating ocean currents called "gyres". In this way it can be transported to literally anywhere in the world. About 8-10 million metric tons of plastic ends up in the ocean each year, making up 80% of all marine pollution. Researchers estimate that by 2050, plastic will likely outweigh all fish in the sea.
Many people choose to ignore the scale of the problem. Obviously it's a huge threat to the global ecosystem as a whole. 17% of the species affected by the presence of plastic in the ocean are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list of threatened species. How long before the unavailability of these creatures affects the food web to a point where it directly threatens our existence? Breaking down into microplastics, it's already been detected in drinking water, salt, beer and the soil in which our food grows. They can cause a whole catalogue of disturbing health complaints and are known to be carcinogenic.
What doesn't break down into microplastics, floats around until it forms vast garbage patches. The biggest is the great Pacific garbage patch, between Hawaii and California. It has an estimated surface area of 1.6 million square kilometres. That's twice the size of Texas, or three times the size of France.
A number of charitable concerns are dedicated to cleaning up the ocean. It's a momentous task, for sure and will cost a pretty penny, even with non profits, charities and volunteers doing the bulk of the work. Instead of buying more weapons and missiles, how about saving the planet and our species with a bit of that budget?
Ghost Fishing is one example of such an operation. The fishing industry inevitably leads to a build up of lost and abandoned nets, pots and lines. It continues to trap marine life, which in turn act as bait for bigger predators. Then there's the damage caused to fragile and vulnerable reefs and no doubt you can imagine the scenario when a ton of floating rubbish meandering around the world from sea to sea, encounters all this. They manage an army of volunteer divers, train more divers, collect crucial data and collect the "ghost gear", doing their bit for your future.
This is all another reminder of just how out of control our pollution of the world has become. There truly is nowhere left to put more of this particular rubbish, that given its durability, we might as well regard as a material that never goes away.
The Zero waste movement.
This is why the zero waste movement has arisen.
People often ask what they should buy to help. This is the first and biggest mistake. The ideal is to reuse, repurpose and upcycle items we already own. Instead of throwing out items we don't need, want or use, we should pass them on to family, friends, neighbours and second hand/thrift shops. Online apps such as OLIO, FREECYCLE, SCRAP and REPURPOSE are a few of the growing number of ways to rescue food, household items, furniture, clothes and just about anything else.
Nobody is expected to change everything overnight, but if we all make a few simple, small changes, collectively, the benefits will be substantial.
The villain of the zero waste movement is single use plastics, such as plastic food packaging. We need to be demanding supermarkets and food manufacturers phase out the use of this and seek alternatives.
There will still be a certain amount of unavoidable such waste. Particularly medical waste, but such an amount can be recycled, whereas it's simply not financially viable to recycle the quantity we are currently producing. "Scoop shops" are a big part of a zero waster's life. Here you can take your own containers and buy food, cleaning products, liquids, pet food and all manner of increasingly varied goods without packaging.
There are companies that deliver specially designed products direct to the customers doorstep. For example, SMOL are one of a new generation of companies supplying household cleaning products, including compostable cloths, vegan, cruelty free, plastic free laundry pods in recycled/recyclable packaging, laundry softener in bottles that the customer returns for refilling and cleaning sprays which are just effervescent tablets, that are dropped into spray bottles of warm water for use.
Gradually governments are either introducing charges for plastic bags, or outlawing them entirely. This has been one of the most positive changes made at a national level.
Items like feminine hygiene products have evolved, rendering disposable paper products redundant. Many people are moving away from wasteful toilet paper and employing wipes (just small squares of material, coloured/patterned for each individual householder), that go into the washing machine after use. There's been a welcome return of the bidet to British bathrooms. Superior in terms of hygiene, gentle on our surroundings and jolly useful for so many purposes, you will thank yourself for giving it a try. Composting has become far easier with nifty receptacles suited to a smaller garden.
The goal is to achieve "zero waste", where we no longer send rubbish to landfill. It's just a matter of finding alternatives that suit your lifestyle and replacing those which caused you to generate rubbish previously. Little by little, it's absolutely achievable.
Without a doubt, the biggest factor is the altered mindset. Instead of that throwaway culture, when offered that mobile upgrade, we have to ask ourselves whether the one we already have isn't quite adequate for our needs. As we stop filling the Earth, air and water with rubbish, we will also slow the rate at which we ravage the meagre remaining resources. within our planet. If we are to survive as a species, this is an imperative. It's time we all took a step back and check our personal use of valuable resources. Now is the time to take advantage of the advances in technology, marketing and environmental awareness, so there will be a liveable place for future generations to live.
Science denial at the top.
We have been held back from making vital changes to our buying habits, because rather than accept responsibility and take action instead of just spouting hot air and platitudes, the people we elected to protect our interests adopted the terrifying practice of science denial. All during a global pandemic, during which one of the most contagious diseases known to man ran rampant, reaping souls in the most remote corners of society. Such behaviour from a body with so much authority is almost inconceivable.
Early landfill experiences.
Back to those early days of landfill when I was young and hadn't yet come to realise just what we were living with. My friends family has bought a new build home, located on top of a landfill site that had not long ago been filled. The houses went up seemingly overnight and sold quickly. It was in quite a nice little town in Central England. I remember thinking how lucky they were to have this new house.
The thing is, the site wasn't flat. It was on a steady, but not overly steep hill, overlooked by an aquaduct on one side, the town centre (three streets of mixed shops) on another and a station on another. You can probably have a good guess at what was going to happen. Within about 9-12 months, the houses were on the move, sliding slowly down towards the bottom of the hill. They would have eventually, tumbled into a mess of bricks, fitted kitchens, bathrooms and broken dreams down there, but the construction company had the foresight to compensate their customers and demolish the houses. It's a pity they didn't have the foresight to figure out what happens as rubbish continues decomposing, especially on an incline.
Meanwhile, my grandparents lived opposite a much bigger site, having a diameter of over a mile. It was surrounded by high fences so you couldn't see the activity in there, but as it turned out, you didn't need to. They had sectioned off the area and were filling one part before moving on to the next. You could see the stream of rubbish trucks going in and out day and night. With the exception of a couple of bottle banks at the local tip, there was no recycling as of yet. The many giant bulldozers could be heard endlessly shoving the mountains of festering waste from here to there and back again. Occasionally something exciting would be discovered, even a stray corpse from time to time. But the main way to gauge the progress of the site was from the constant swarms of huge flies and bluebottles. You might imagine the smell could become a problem for local residents, but there's no way anyone could have a window or door open at any time, for long enough to get a whiff. Not unless they wanted to share a house with clouds of buzzing diseases with wings and ultimately their larval offspring.
As so often is the case when you're young, it's hard to judge how long they lived like this. But I know it was several lengthy, hot, stifling summers. This must be when one of lifes enduring mysteries came to me. These insects have huge eyes that can see panoramically. For a creature that can see so much, they sure do fly into some apparent obstacles, notably the windows (hard enough to cause them to drop onto the window ledge/floor as if dead) and my open mouth. Although despite persistently guiding them to safety, the brainless things cannot find an open window when they're stuck in the house. My other grandparents who lived about a mile away were spared this particular delight. However, it's a busy road that serves the city centre, so lots of lives were affected.
As each area was completed, tall, slender chimneys would appear, towering high above the fence, with a flame protruding from the tip, like a row of sentinel lit matches. This is to vent the gases produced during the deposition process, high into the sky (even then it was clear this was not something people should be inhaling.
But there's no way all the gas from these immense stacks of rubbish could be directed into these structures. A good amount of gas and liquid (stuff you can guarantee is anything but healthy) escapes into the surrounding earth and subsequently the local water table. We discovered the extent of this seepage when garages, garden sheds, outhouses and other outbuildings that weren't frequently ventilated started exploding. A mile away, my other grandmother was somewhat shaken when the house behind hers exploded, sending the roof shooting into the sky. Residents weren't compensated in any way for the plague of buzzing, winged dirtbags. I don't know if there was reparation for the victims of the exploding buildings. My grandparents would probably have been regarded as "adequately warned" which would have deterred any thought of liability back then. Compensation culture hadn't yet taken hold and the attitude was very much that "accidents" were exactly that..accidental. Children who had accidents (the token broken arm incurred when falling from a scaled tree, firework mishaps, being hot by a car while playing football or riding bikes in the road), were a result of carelessness or a child not listening to grown ups. We were always encouraged to take full responsibility for our actions and any unfortunate consequences. This is something I would definitely regard as a positive I'm terms of social and community alliances.
Well, eventually the areas of bulldozer activity could be heard making its way towards the near end of the site. Behind the fences, ranks of chimneys stood to attention, venting the deadly gases. But gradually it was landscaped (of a fashion) and a large supermarket occupies one corner. People come from mike's around to this, one of Britain's first true superstores. The fences still stand.
According to a news article from 2014, the site was an unusually deep one and the nature of the terrain means it will take many years for the volatile gases to dissipate. It had been pinpointed as an ideal site to house a solar farm, but the article (now 8 years old), said building there would be banned for at least another 20 years. It had originally been cleared for the purposes of landfill in 1972. I noticed it's frequently still described as a "landfill site" in local descriptions, which gives the idea that the activity might still be continuing somewhere on the huge no-go zone. It's ironically described as a "nature reserve" despite the fact that it requires a constant security presence to keep members of the public out and fire breaks have to be made.
This gives Some idea of just how toxic these places are once filled with our rubbish. It's something to keep in mind when looking at that smartphone upgrade you don't really need.
Additional reading and sites of interest:
*https://earth.org/us-military-pollution/
*https://puratium.com/why-zero-waste-is-important/
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