green scene... urban jungle
a load of old rubbish
What have you bought lately? A burger? A chocolate bar? A fancy stereo?
Whatever it was it almost certainly came in a wrapper or a package that you ripped off straight away and put in the bin! Having done its job the packaging became totally useless immediately. Hmmmm, if only it could just evaporate…
We now use over 3.2 MILLION TONNES of plastic and cardboard a year for packaging which is TWICE what we used 10 years ago.
You may not give it another thought but it takes nature years or even centuries to deal with all our old rubbish!
states of decay
How long it takes nature to break down and ‘recycle’ an object it depends on what it’s made of and what’s able to pull it apart.
Oxygen in the air and sunlight can help decompose many materials.
Meanwhile, living things like bacteria, moulds and fungi regard some types of rubbish as a square meal and will happily munch their way through them. (This is known as biodegradable waste.)
But this takes a lot longer than your average lunch break! Orange peel can take between six months and two years to decay, while an aluminium soft drinks can takes 50 to 100 years!
But the real everlastin’undestructin’everlivin’neverdecayin’ substance is….
drastic plastic
Plastics are a particular pain (though undeniably useful of course in many ways). This is because their molecules are tightly bound together and very very hard to prise apart.
And because plastic is a relatively new material, only around in the last century, no micro-organisms have yet evolved that are able to digest it.
Plastic Factoid1 – Each Household in Britain uses 323 plastic supermarket bags per year (which’ll be why your plastic bag drawer in the kitchen won’t shut properly) but each and every one will take 10 – 20 years to decay. Sturdier plastic items like plastic bottles, will take hundreds of years, if not thousands … no one knows yet.
Plastic factoid2 – In Ireland now plastic bags at the supermarket have to cost 15 cents or about 9p which means the average household, if they never remember to take their long-lasting bags with them to the supermarket, will spend roughly £29 a year on plastic bags! The money raised (and they think it will be a massive £111million pounds) will go to the government and be spent on schemes to improve the Irish environment. Do you think this is a good idea for the UK as well? Do you think a 9p tax is enough? Tell us what you think! Email ideas@planet-science.com and put Package This! in the subject line.
Although we throw away less plastic than other materials it’s the one environmentalists worry most about because it lasts so very long.
Plastic may take ages to decay on land, but it takes even longer in water. And not only do plastics hang about in the sea but they become a danger for marine mammals and birds. Marine conservationists estimate that over 1 million birds and 100,000 sea mammals die each year after becoming entangled in plastic nets and ropes, or eating plastic items which become stuck inside them.
degradable plastic?
Scientists are now finding ways to make plastic biodegradable. By incorporating additives into the long chains of molecules of the plastic, it becomes more susceptible to attack and decay. Starch, for example, a component from plants like potatoes, can be added and this is easily attacked by micro-organisms. As the starch breaks down, the molecular chains fall to pieces, and the plastic object crumbles to powder. But it’s only the starch that is eaten away – the powdery plastic remains. So the up- side is that the plastic breaks down, saves marine mammals, and reduces unsightly litter. But the down side is that the plastic remains in the environment, just in powdery form.
Another approach is to work with plastics made by bacteria. It might sound odd, but some bacteria produce a natural plastic that may be suitable for producing everyday items for us humans. As this material has been around for a lot longer than man-made plastics, there are microbes that can digest it.
a load of old landfill
Where do all those millions of tonnes of rubbish go?
Well, most of it gets carted off to landfill sites. Which gets rid of the problem but is rather like sweeping dust under a carpet and hoping it doesn’t come back to haunt us!
Huge holes are dug in the ground, filled with compacted rubbish, and a layer of landscaping put over the top. Would you do this in your back garden?
When the hole is full a new site must be found. As we’re on a small island and have a large population, we will eventually run out of places to hide our waste.
It would be comforting to think that if left alone all the rubbish in landfill sites would eventually break down into some sort of lovely compost, but the truth is that, away from sunlight and oxygen, even totally organic objects take a really long time to decay. In fact they tend to mummify rather than break down.
Researchers who dig through these mounds say that they can recognise half eaten sandwiches that have been sitting around for GET THIS decades! EEEUUUUUUU!
If organic waste won’t break down in a landfill site what hope is there that metals and plastics will?
money down a big hole
It takes energy and resources to make all the stuff we just dump, and we all pay for it in the price of our products.
Forests of trees for paper and card, wells of oil for plastics, mines of metal for drinks cans.
But all these resources don’t have to go into landfill. They could be recycled or burnt to produce heat and electricity for our homes.
Here in Britain we have a long way to go with recycling. There are many schemes to recycle glass bottles but we still chuck out five out of every six straight into the bin. Each year, £36 million worth of aluminium goes into landfill sites while every household throws 6 trees’ worth of paper straight into the bin.
eco-economics
One of the big problems with deciding what to do with waste is that the economics involved are very complicated. It takes time and energy to recycle waste – it has to be collected, transported sorted and then processed. In some cases it takes more energy to recycle a product than to make it from scratch.
Burning waste to produce energy might seem like a good thing to do, but many items produce dangerous gases and particles that cannot be allowed to escape up the furnace chimney and into the air.
polution solutions?
Germany is often held up as a place where they’ve got a grip on the issue of packaging. Their scheme involves companies paying the German government a levy to pay for the management of the waste their product creates. The less recyclable their product, the more money they pay, so they have an incentive to keep it simple. In return their product is able to bear the green dot that tells the consumer that they have paid their levy, and consumers in Germany are very eco-aware.
They also have laws that say that bottles have to be reused. You pay extra for the bottle, and you get it back when you return it to the supermarket. We used to do that here in the UK – could we be bothered to do it again?
less is more
So, you can see that with all the problems and complex issues surrounding the rubbish we all produce perhaps it would be better if we simply used less packaging to start with. But weaning ourselves off the culture of packaging will be hard. Are you up for it?
Tell us what you think about the subject of recycling, reusing or living without packaging! Put Package This! in the subject line and write to us at ideas@planet-science.com
But most of all - however depressing and dismal the state of rubbish is at the moment, remember scientists are helping to solve the problem, and governments are on the case.
And best of all, there are things you can do – go to What Can I do? to find out more.
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