It was a dark and stormy night...
- Vicky Harrison
- Feb 8, 2019
- 3 min read
Day of judgement this week: how much plastic is in the black bin after a month of trying to reduce plastic waste? To our delight, not that much, and some of that is from using up things we bought before plastic-redacted was implemented, such as packets of frozen bread rolls and peas in the freezer. Plus there was the plastic sausage roll packet that resulted in a heated debate / tiff between me and Mr Harrison:
Me: (upon discovery of sausage roll packet) Mr Harrison!
Mr Harrison: I was hungry and I didn’t make a sandwich this morning.
Me: But it’s got a clear plastic (horrific gasp) non-recyclable cover on the front!
Mr Harrison: I did make sure it was a part-paper bag, so I was halfway there…
Me: It’s still plastic and you know what “we” think about plastic!
Mr Harrison: Stop getting at me, woman!
Me: That’s it! (reaching for a bread knife)
Mr Harrison: You always have to escalate things, don’t you?
Mr Harrison escaped injury free… this time. Perhaps I am getting a bit militant about the whole plastic thing. Anyhow, the positive thing is there is now a much happier waste level in the bin compared to the Mount Vesuvius eruptions seen at Christmas.
The disadvantages of a fairly empty wheelie bin, though, are that on windy nights there is (a) a lot of noise as the bins falls over in the dead of night waking you up, and (b) rubbish makes a bid for freedom all over the street and garden. Mr Harrison was out early yesterday in the wind and rain picking up all the rubbish that had floated around our house. Obviously, I needed to stay indoors to get the kids ready for school, but we all hovered at the upstairs window to check on his progress / give waves of encouragement.
But overall, less plastic in the environment in general and stuff heading to a landfill, speaking of which…
“The Secret Life of Landfill”
We are still a bit in the dark ages and tape stuff off the telly on to a hard disc drive, because we don’t always have enough time in that 7 day window to catch stuff on iPlayer. Hence, I dusted off this BBC Four programme that I taped way back in October about landfills – sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Its on YouTube if you want to watch it, as it slipped off iPlayer ages and ages ago.
But the programme was really interesting in terms of the history of waste and how it’s changed over time, taking you from typically ceramic-based waste from Victorian times to the introduction of plastic waste in the 1950s and the more “sophisticated” electronic wastes of the modern era. The presenters went around digging away at old landfills and seeing how much the materials had or hadn’t degraded.
What was more worrying to me was the modern landfill they were looking at in Scotland and the waste that was being dumped today. There was a lot of things that at face value that could have been recycled, like certain plastics. One of the enlightening conclusions of the programme was that in the future landfills might be mined to retrieve some of these wastes like metals used in electronics as it would be cheaper to mine them from a landfill than to try and mine and process the raw materials. As raw materials for plastic generation become rarer (we all know oil isn’t going to last for ever), plastics that haven’t degraded in landfill could be reclaimed and reused.
Our household attempt to reduce our plastic waste, especially the plastics that can’t be recycled, is morphing into a general effort to reduce all our waste. We’re very lucky to have around 80% of our waste being recyclable (see logo on our colourful bin lorry!), but we want to see if we can avoid using any of that 20% that can’t. Just got to work out what they are – bet their mainly plastic based!
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