Plastic Mountain

trivial_poursuivant

Your local recycling centre probably deals with bulk rubbish. Metal, glass, beds, furniture, electrical items. The stuff you throw out once in a while as a household. Yes it’s a lot put it pales into insignificance when you take the amount of plastic used every day by every person week in week out and even the recyclable stuff has about 10% chance of actually being recycled and not ending up in landfill or strewn across a beach . Think of every wrapper or package that gets thrown away in your house every day, times it by 365 and then think every house doing so up and down the country. Every single day. A bit of rotten meat or veg is f@ck all in this equation

pinno

Here we go (and no one consulted me before posting this thread).

I waz in the waste management bizness as a few of you may know. 3 National Gold Stars for Recycling:

https://www.aliss.org/caboose/resources/587148/

'Cradle to grave' was a notion presented at a national conference to a group of recyclers that we belonged to (CRNS - Community Recycling Network for Scotland) and industrial waste managers by both EPA and SEPA way back in 2005. The idea is that the responsibility for dealing with the waste should lie with the producer, the seller and the end user. I posed the question of whether there was going to be legislation to enforce it, to which there was a dumb silence.
We knew about the demand and pressures on landfill way back when we started. In fact, for 2 years running (2009 - 2011), we received landfill diversion credits to the tune of £44 per ton. I'e the tax that would have been levied on the council had we not diverted it. Until the money was no longer ring fenced by councils under an SNP directive on council budgeting but that's another story but significant to our region and indicative of poor waste management. Or at least, poor emphasis.

Now, landfill tax is £94 in Strathclyde in and excess of £140 per ton in the South East. Now that Council Tax is no longer frozen, councils can pass this cost directly on to the tax payers. I also see a problem, single persons, unemployed persons etc etc can get huge reductions on council tax payments - here they can get concessions down to paying 25% of the total bill. If the waste component of the Council Tax bill was not reduced accordingly i'e fixed, no matter what the status of the household, then I think you would see a huge upsurge in recycling. On the other end of the scale, people who are not prepared to recycle and happy to pay an increase - let them; but restrict the amount they can send to landfill and hammer them for the excess.

Here comes the rub. Before the crash in 2008, we sent a lot of our plastics to Belgium. When recyclable milk bottle plastic prices sunk to £5 per ton, the Belgians were not interested so they started sending it to China, with minimal profit and huge indemnities for dirty/contaminated/mixed plastic.
The root problem is that on average, there are 6 different plastics used for food packaging but some councils recycle more of them, some less. Have a look at the triangle at the bottom of most plastic containers and within the triangle you will see a number. Manufacturers will say that x is made with recyclable plastic but x might not be recycled by your council or in some cases, no where in the UK but the manufacturers will say that they have done their bit by using a plastic that is recyclable.
What needs to be done, is to reduce the variety of plastics and restrict the variety to only the plastics that have at least a residual value (even if it is only to offset recycling costs) but to make all plastics recyclable. If you see what I mean. It's not recyclable if no one is prepared to recycle it.
This 'streamlining' has to happen across all packaging.

For example: I used to deliver these huge tubes of Wotsits. Well, starch without some yellow colouring and flavouring to a company Gloucester. We could dispense with all bubble wrap and use it instead - totally recyclable and environmentally friendly.

Pressure has to placed on the manufacturers. When they say that the cost of things will go up, well yes, in the short term until the infrastructure is in place to deal with it but most of their protestations are bollox. However, if we gave access to funding/tax incentives for product process development where companies may require different machinery to a package using different plastic and on the other hand, disincentives for using plastics that are not recyclable, then we may start to see a wholesale reduction in plastic use and an increase in plastic re-use. If you produce the plastics that are easier to recover, then you create an internal market where everybody benefits and more importantly, the environment benefits.

Reducing plastic requires supporting and legislation of a 'Cradle to grave' structure and policy.

ben@31

When you said plastic mountains and sending junk to other countries. It reminded me of this documentary, I think its one of the best he's done and well worth a watch. Seeing how their supply chain works to recycle copper cables and sell it on, was an eye opener. What surprised me is seeing domestic "white goods" from big brand British shops ending up out there ?
Well worth a watch if you have a spare hour....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p ... aste-dump#

thistle_

Pross wrote:

Many parts of Wales have pretty stringent recycling. There's places in North Wales with monthly collection but I prefer the system we have where they still do fortnightly collections but have replaced the non-recyclable bins with one half the size so we are still putting a quarter of the amount of waste into landfill compared to 10-15 years ago. Apparently Wales has the best recycling rates in Europe after Germany, plenty moan when the rules change but like everything if the authorities stick to their guns it soon calms down.

I think WAG set out some pretty challenging recycling targets several years ago and the local authorities have managed to achieve them.
The OH (from Derbyshire) was amazed at our 'tip' - you drive around and chuck all your different things into 1 of 20 skips for different types of waste so it can be 'recycled' - they had nothing of the sort where she used to live.
I found the score on the door at the tip impressive - 90% of waste 'recycled' last month however I suspect this is just the ratio of the weight of the 'recycleable' skips divided by the total weight of waste regardless of what happens to the 'recycleables'.

Unfortunately some local authorities are now backtracking on progress to save money/increase revenue:
* My mum now has a quota for the amount of stuff she can take to the tip, even recyclables like paper/cardboard and garden waste.
* Another local authority is starting to charge for collecting garden waste and the interweb is saying they will just chuck everything in the normal bin/fly tip it. If they'd put up council tax by another 0.03% and offered a rebate for people who don't use it I think this would have worked better...
* Several local authorities want to go to 4 weekly bin collections and quite openly say this is to save money.

rjsterry

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Ben6899 wrote:

Mr Goo wrote:

It'll also mean changes to packaging etc etc.

Good. Fruit sold in plastic wrappers, ffs.

This is what happens when you let supermarkets destroy high street and corner shop businesses like green grocers , butchers etc. I can remember all fruit being loose sold in paper bags and you weighed it yourself. Same in butchers. Meat was wrapped in paper. Now it’s all cellophane and polystyrene . Neither are recyclable. If you think about all the food in your cupboards at home, how much is in eco-friendly packaging? Milk is no longer in glass bottles. Things like individually wrapped sweets or single portion food and drinks etc are insanely wasteful. I’d rather pay a bit more for a chocolate bar wrapped in paper and foil than plastic. Yes Foil is expensive to make but it’s not going to poison the environment as it degrades.

You'd have a lot more food lost to wastage (and there's more than enough already) if you went back to packaging perishable food in paper. Meat production is pretty carbon intensive so we shouldn't let it rot -letting things rot releases methane which compounds the problem. Plastic milk bottles are one of the easiest to recycle. It's complicated.
Farmers Markets are lovely but they are mainly aimed at those with disposable income and are never going to be the main source of the country's groceries.

And that is the dismissive nature of things. We can pollute the planet but oh no we can’t be seen wasting good food. A new way of working needs introducing not just a shrug and say ‘ah well it’s better than X’

Wasting food is polluting the planet! Add the carbon emissions of producing the stuff to the methane from letting it rot. I'm not dismissing anything; absolutely we need to reduce and deal with our own waste, but a return to some semi-mythical golden age of paper bags is not the solution. We do have recycling infrastructure in this country albeit with plenty of room for improvement. My local service has improved in the last few years despite cuts in council funding.

Rotting fruit is polluting the planet? The food rotting will also balance out and probably help somewhere doing the line as it decomposes. Plastic will be with us for millennia. That is a shite excuse to say rotting food. Again the point of working out another way to manage short term waste needs sorting. You’re too ready to find excuses for plastic. And that’s the very issue and why we need to break the cycle

The UK produces 16-18million tonnes per year of food waste. Without packaging, some but not all of which will need to be plastic, that total would undoubtedly go up. Food waste produces methane at the rate of 50-800 cubic metres per tonne. Methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. I think that counts as pollution. Add on the CO2 released in production: ~12tonnes per tonne for beef and that is definitely pollution even if you can't see the gases.

I've no idea what you mean by decomposing food 'balancing out'.

Obviously that doesn't preclude reducing the use of plastic as far as possible and limiting the mixing of different types of plastic within one piece of packaging so recycling is much simpler to achieve.

pinno

Has anyone mentioned the amount of Methane produced by cattle bred to feed the increasing and seemingly insatiable appetite for red meat? Never mind the destruction of rainforest to grow Soya to feed the cattle... and Soya renders the ground fallow after just 2 seasons, time to cut some more forest down.

capt_slog

Ben6899 wrote:

It's not that straight forward in our experience. Fruit, veg and fish (I'm pescetarian so we rarely buy other meat) is actually cheaper.

What's your star sign got to do with anything?



But anyway. The subject was on the radio yesterday lunchtime (Jeremy Vine). A chap on there raised some interesting points about the recycling thing, and the example given was a plastic tag that came with a new shirt. Quite a small piece of plastic that was marked as recyclable, but the problem was that no-one would ever bother to sort it out to do so, it was just too small to be worth the effort.

It's those 'ignored' bits that are going to be the problem. There's a lot of them. Blister packs are my favourite 'moan', the main purpose of them is just convenient point of sale, but the plastic involved is often greater than used in the product, memory cards for example.

pinno

The main point of blister packs was part of an EU directive to reduce suicide rates and easier to prevent accidental over-dosing.
My friends wife is a dispenser and she does pre-arranged week schedules for old people's homes and says that the blister packs are a complete PITA. So bottled pills in certain instances should be preferable.

Why certain drugs have to be in blister packs I do not know.

trivial_poursuivant

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Ben6899 wrote:

Mr Goo wrote:

It'll also mean changes to packaging etc etc.

Good. Fruit sold in plastic wrappers, ffs.

This is what happens when you let supermarkets destroy high street and corner shop businesses like green grocers , butchers etc. I can remember all fruit being loose sold in paper bags and you weighed it yourself. Same in butchers. Meat was wrapped in paper. Now it’s all cellophane and polystyrene . Neither are recyclable. If you think about all the food in your cupboards at home, how much is in eco-friendly packaging? Milk is no longer in glass bottles. Things like individually wrapped sweets or single portion food and drinks etc are insanely wasteful. I’d rather pay a bit more for a chocolate bar wrapped in paper and foil than plastic. Yes Foil is expensive to make but it’s not going to poison the environment as it degrades.

You'd have a lot more food lost to wastage (and there's more than enough already) if you went back to packaging perishable food in paper. Meat production is pretty carbon intensive so we shouldn't let it rot -letting things rot releases methane which compounds the problem. Plastic milk bottles are one of the easiest to recycle. It's complicated.
Farmers Markets are lovely but they are mainly aimed at those with disposable income and are never going to be the main source of the country's groceries.

And that is the dismissive nature of things. We can pollute the planet but oh no we can’t be seen wasting good food. A new way of working needs introducing not just a shrug and say ‘ah well it’s better than X’

Wasting food is polluting the planet! Add the carbon emissions of producing the stuff to the methane from letting it rot. I'm not dismissing anything; absolutely we need to reduce and deal with our own waste, but a return to some semi-mythical golden age of paper bags is not the solution. We do have recycling infrastructure in this country albeit with plenty of room for improvement. My local service has improved in the last few years despite cuts in council funding.

Rotting fruit is polluting the planet? The food rotting will also balance out and probably help somewhere doing the line as it decomposes. Plastic will be with us for millennia. That is a shite excuse to say rotting food. Again the point of working out another way to manage short term waste needs sorting. You’re too ready to find excuses for plastic. And that’s the very issue and why we need to break the cycle

The UK produces 16-18million tonnes per year of food waste. Without packaging, some but not all of which will need to be plastic, that total would undoubtedly go up. Food waste produces methane at the rate of 50-800 cubic metres per tonne. Methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. I think that counts as pollution. Add on the CO2 released in production: ~12tonnes per tonne for beef and that is definitely pollution even if you can't see the gases.

I've no idea what you mean by decomposing food 'balancing out'.

Obviously that doesn't preclude reducing the use of plastic as far as possible and limiting the mixing of different types of plastic within one piece of packaging so recycling is much simpler to achieve.

Supermarkets are starting to do more about food waste. And if it means people have to be a bit more careful how they shop and buy only for a few days so be it. Problem is the local shops are all closing so it’s harder to do - mainly cos supermarkets have driven them out of business with their highly stocked plastic wrapped produce. So it’s a problem we have allowed to be created. We obviously produce more food than we need, so we’ll have to produce less.

Now you’re going to bang on about jobs, businesses, costs etc. Butvis all that more important than making sure future generations aren’t left with a global disaster? This is as big a problem as global warming. It’s destroying wildlife. It’s thevselfish I’m not prepared to change attitude that’s preventing anything happening. Look how much people complained about 5p bags. That’s cut them massively so the same actions can work and people will just have to accept it. Things don’t change overnight so a small amount of food waste will eventually level out when manufacturers change their ways of operating.

trivial_poursuivant

Think off all the foods that come plastic wrapped. Some short life perishable stuff like raw and cooked meats , dairy obviously need some sort of protection. But it’s not just that. A chocolate bar is not going to go off and create a huge methane cloud. Neither are a lot of products that are wrapped in plastic . A packet of crisps, a small item of 50g in a plastic bag, sold inside another plastic bag as a multi pack. It’s just pointless waste in the name of convenience. There are so many products like this that are so wasteful. Think of a box of minatude hero’s. A box of mars bars, bounty’s, etc sliced up and wrapped again individually is all it is in essence and it’s more ridiculous waste. Bread doesn’t need to be kept in a plastic bag. It will stay fresh for a few days in a bread bin but because it generally only has about 4 days of life from buying it in store nowadays half gets binned before eating. It’s lazy waste. A loaf of bread probably spends half it’s life sitting in transport before being put on a shelf to then have about 4 days use. That’s obscene.

slowbike

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Neither are a lot of products that are wrapped in plastic . A packet of crisps, a small item of 50g in a plastic bag, sold inside another plastic bag as a multi pack. It’s just pointless waste in the name of convenience. There are so many products like this that are so wasteful. Think of a box of minatude hero’s. A box of mars bars, bounty’s, etc sliced up and wrapped again individually is all it is in essence and it’s more ridiculous waste. Bread doesn’t need to be kept in a plastic bag. It will stay fresh for a few days in a bread bin but because it generally only has about 4 days of life from buying it in store nowadays half gets binned before eating. It’s lazy waste. A loaf of bread probably spends half it’s life sitting in transport before being put on a shelf to then have about 4 days use. That’s obscene.

If the chocolates weren't individually wrapped then they'd melt together.
If crisps weren't in an airtight container then they'd go soft.
If bread isn't kept in an airtight container then it goes stale.

Not suggesting that plastic is the best answer - but it's certainly a well used product for these items.

trivial_poursuivant

Slowbike wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Neither are a lot of products that are wrapped in plastic . A packet of crisps, a small item of 50g in a plastic bag, sold inside another plastic bag as a multi pack. It’s just pointless waste in the name of convenience. There are so many products like this that are so wasteful. Think of a box of minatude hero’s. A box of mars bars, bounty’s, etc sliced up and wrapped again individually is all it is in essence and it’s more ridiculous waste. Bread doesn’t need to be kept in a plastic bag. It will stay fresh for a few days in a bread bin but because it generally only has about 4 days of life from buying it in store nowadays half gets binned before eating. It’s lazy waste. A loaf of bread probably spends half it’s life sitting in transport before being put on a shelf to then have about 4 days use. That’s obscene.

If the chocolates weren't individually wrapped then they'd melt together.
If crisps weren't in an airtight container then they'd go soft.
If bread isn't kept in an airtight container then it goes stale.

Not suggesting that plastic is the best answer - but it's certainly a well used product for these items.

The chocolate doesn’t need to be sold like that. Sell larger bars and cut them. Boxes of sweets like that should be banned tbh. Crisps can still have the individual bag but does it need to sit in another on top of that?
Bread can be produced locally so it lasts longer instead of wasting away in a truck or a storeroom. And bread bought in bakeries doesn’t go stale that quick. Point is is fresh and lasts 4 days that’s better than a loaf being wrapped in plastic, made miles away only to life half it’s useable life where it can’t be eaten.

BTW, my wife makes bread at home and it lasts a good 4 days before getting stale so if that’s homemade without additives I’m sure mass produced companies can do it. It’s not that long ago I saw bread in waxed paper bags not plastic. Can’t remember the brand but why not that? Paper is a lot more recyclable than a thin polythene bag.

kingstongraham

Mr Goo wrote:

I think fruit and veg can still be supplied in plastic wrapping and containers. But it needs to be a recyclable plastic.
Check out Florette packaged salads. The plastic wrapper is 100% recyclable, yet next to it at Tescos the own brand equivalent is not in recyclable plastic.
The onus needs to be on the supermarkets and food suppliers plus government to put in place the recycling plant infrastructure.

Well yes - there's no point in recyclable if it isn't actually recycled. Better to reduce use where possible, surely.

Example from Kingston:

Plastic film cannot be recycled in Kingston. This includes clingfilm, salad bags, magazine wrapping, film lids (e.g. on meat), crisp packets and bubblewrap. Please place this in your black wheelie bin for rubbish. Please ignore any messages, numbers or coding on the packaging about whether it can be recycled or not.

capt_slog

Pinno wrote:

The main point of blister packs was part of an EU directive to reduce suicide rates and easier to prevent accidental over-dosing.
My friends wife is a dispenser and she does pre-arranged week schedules for old people's homes and says that the blister packs are a complete PITA. So bottled pills in certain instances should be preferable.

Why certain drugs have to be in blister packs I do not know.

Not the blister packs i had in mind (but I'm not arguing against your point).

These...

...and anything else packaged this way.

I've long been of the opinion that one of their purposes is to make people less likely to take the goods back to the shop. There's no way you can restore the packaging back to saleable after it's been opened.

trivial_poursuivant

Stuff like this beggars belief!

rjsterry

Plastics pollution is certainly a big problem. Whether it's as big an issue as AGW, I'm less sure, although they're obviously difficult to compare.

Just to put plastics in context with other types of waste in landfill, have a look at the first document in this link.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... rity-waste

rjsterry

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Stuff like this beggars belief!

Indeed. Not that I've ever seen pre-peeled bananas for sale in this country.

trivial_poursuivant

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Stuff like this beggars belief!

Indeed. Not that I've ever seen pre-peeled bananas for sale in this country.

It was in Austria I think but last time I looked we still shared a planet with them.

tangled_metal

Late to the thread but here's my view on a few of the issues.

Supermarkets produce too much packaging. We don't need it. If more ppl opened packaged fruit and veg at the checkout and handed it back for the supermarket to deal with it would stop. You have the right to do this you know and I've seen it done just once. We're too lazy and conformist to do this. We probably don't want to hold the line up being such civilized queuing nation.

Supermarket packaging is often made up of two different materials, one of which is possibly non-recyclable. A simple change makes recycling easier. One, recyclable material for the tray holding the fruit and the wrapper. Or card tray and recyclable wrapper. Or only loose fruit and veg with paper bags.

Shopping at supermarkets or individual shops? Hmmm! Whichever you choose will say a lot about your lifestyle. Time to shop around, kids tagging along, disposable income, etc. All factors in that. Personally we don't have time to shop around. We go to one shop and once a month go to another for the meat. Corner shop for milk when we run out.

So next point I have is about local collections. They're random. By this I mean no nation wide system. Needs that. Our council started recycling collections with one waste type mixed in with another. Then they changed it without telling ppl. I got a snotty letter hand delivered by the collecting personnel about it. I changed. Then I spotted they put paper in one collection opening but everything else went into the other opening. So we separate glass and tins into one, plastics into another and card into the third. They tip card / paper onto one container and the rest into a second container.

Apparently its sorted at the recycling firm. I know one recycling firm and they sort out a lot but mostly bale it up for containerization. China, India or a third country like Philippines or Bangladesh. Either way it's going out of the UK for proper sorting. If not China then there's other countries taking our waste. IIRC Nigeria takes most of our electrical appliances. There's slums where ppl burn cables for the copper by the side of streams that likely be highly polluted. BTW there's a dump over the river from where I work and there's often ppl burning cables for the copper there and that's in the UK.

I believe China now produces more than enough of its own plastic waste so no longer needs European and American waste to feed production. Plus they are moving quickly to develop their green industry. China will one day be leaders in green industry I reckon. It's a long term strategy that will result in them displacing even USA in new technologies. Heck! They're starting to generate brands in things from smartphones to computers. Computers they bought into but it's the way they're intending to go. They even want to take on Nike with trainers and sporting goods.

This could all be good for the UK and the planet. We. Need a driver. Push / pull principle. Give incentives to change but also apply burning platforms to make it better to jump into the difficult unknown than stay on the burning platform.

rjsterry

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Stuff like this beggars belief!

Indeed. Not that I've ever seen pre-peeled bananas for sale in this country.

It was in Austria I think but last time I looked we still shared a planet with them.

Of course, I'm not defending pre-peeled bananas, but packs of apples, which you see in every supermarket and corner shop, are a more relevant target.

rjsterry

This might be why China is calling time on taking our low grade plastics.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/just ... an-plastic

trivial_poursuivant

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Stuff like this beggars belief!

Indeed. Not that I've ever seen pre-peeled bananas for sale in this country.

It was in Austria I think but last time I looked we still shared a planet with them.

Of course, I'm not defending pre-peeled bananas, but packs of apples, which you see in every supermarket and corner shop, are a more relevant target.

Not really. An apple could be washed and packaged so it’s ready to eat when bought. Not that I condone that but it’s a reason. The bananas - CAME WITH A BLOODY INEDIBLE WRAPPER! It’s skin. Which was removed to stick in another plastic one. Where is the sense in any of that?

capt_slog

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

rjsterry wrote:

Trivial poursuivant wrote:

Stuff like this beggars belief!

Indeed. Not that I've ever seen pre-peeled bananas for sale in this country.

It was in Austria I think but last time I looked we still shared a planet with them.

Of course, I'm not defending pre-peeled bananas, but packs of apples, which you see in every supermarket and corner shop, are a more relevant target.

Not really. An apple could be washed and packaged so it’s ready to eat when bought. Not that I condone that but it’s a reason. The bananas - CAME WITH A BLOODY INEDIBLE WRAPPER! It’s skin. Which was removed to stick in another plastic one. Where is the sense in any of that?

I can't defend it, but I can see a reason...

Packaged that way it's impossible for you to buy a bad one.

mamba80

Given all the reasons why plastics arent suddenly going to disappear.....isnt the tech available to clean burn certain plastics ?

rjsterry

mamba80 wrote:

Given all the reasons why plastics arent suddenly going to disappear.....isnt the tech available to clean burn certain plastics ?

Cleanish already exists in the form of CHP plants and that is one way we will deal with the stuff that is too difficult/uneconomic to recycle.

nickice

Ben6899 wrote:

About time, if that does happen. We're not encouraged sufficiently to recycle in the UK. For example, in Germany (in BW anyway), recycling is collected every week and landfill every 3 or 4 weeks. So you either treat your waste responsibly (recycle what can be recycled) or it ends up collecting as landfill on your drive for a month at a time. And if you put something recyclable in the landfill waste then you'll receive a fine. Not the threat of a fine, an actual fine from the state.

On the face of it, the German system looks good, but, on the face of it, the French system also looks good. Except that half the plastics can't actually be recycled (yoghurt pots for example).

mamba80

rjsterry wrote:

mamba80 wrote:

Given all the reasons why plastics arent suddenly going to disappear.....isnt the tech available to clean burn certain plastics ?

Cleanish already exists in the form of CHP plants and that is one way we will deal with the stuff that is too difficult/uneconomic to recycle.

but the uk doesnt do enough of it, hence the low grade stuff shipped to China, an awful lot of nimbyism, understandable though, who wants all the lorries and a 200ft chimney next to their garden?

to me the emphasis has to be on reduction in use, recycling & alt uses, somehow i doubt the UK population is capable of being re-educated in the short to medium term :roll:

Ben6899

mamba80 wrote:

who wants a 200ft chimney next to their garden?

Build it in a Brexit stronghold. Local jobs for local people. That's they want, right?

laurentian

To me, and I worked in the food industry for 20 years, the answer seems quite simple. There should be a timeframe enshrined in legislation at the end of which, no food (possibly all consumable) items can be packaged in anything that isn't easily recyclable. The "ease of recycling" being dictated by the recyclers and the aim being to make a very simple "bin system" at the end user's end consisting of three or four colour coded bins backed up with waste audits to check that end users are fulfilling their recycling obligations with fines for non-conformance.

The time frame is very important and should not be open ended - I would anticipate that during this time the situation would only get better.

The only equivalent thing I can think of is the charge on plastic bags which has massively reduced their use and I can't remember the last time I saw one in a hedge.

Also, I get my milk from the milkman, delivered to the door with the packaging recycled hundreds of times and money collected from me, in my house, once a month - why anyone would swap that convenience for a trip to the shops a couple of times a week beats me.

mamba80

Ben6899 wrote:

mamba80 wrote:

who wants a 200ft chimney next to their garden?

Build it in a Brexit stronghold. Local jobs for local people. That's they want, right?

good point.... turn them all into remoaners in an instant lol!