Recycle it or burn it
When pulling my wheelie bin out to the front of my house earlier this week it occurred to me how light it was and in fact how light it always is these days. So much so it almost seems worth opting out of the weekly collections to let it fill up a bit more so it’s worth the council collecting it. Especially as it doesn’t seem to get that smelly (as we compost most stuff and have a waste disposal unit or any cooked food waste and no nappies to deal with yet) even in Summer or should a I say that mildly warm and damp period we’ve just had where there should have a been a summer.
Anyhow I looked up and down the street at all the wheelie bins and the plastic recycling boxes. Our council provides us with two; one for paper/cardboard and one for plastic bottles, metals cans and glass. I’ve always wondered how they deal with all the broken glass when they sort it (as it all seems to get collected in a compactor lorry so must get crushed). When you look at all the boxes in just one street it looks like a lot of recycling (which must be good), but also an awful lot of sorting and once sorted it must have to be shipped to different plants for processing, which must mean a lot of lorry miles, a lot of carbon fuel burnt and a lot of CO2 produced.
I mentioned this to one of our plastic bottle suppliers who told me he’d been to visit a state of the art incinerator on the Isle of Man, where they clean burn all their rubbish as opposed to recycling it. So this lead to a Google search and the Sita EfW (Energy from Waste) website.
It’s worth a quick read as it’s pretty interesting and certainly worthy of a part in the larger debate. It does appear to create CO2 emissions, but I haven’t as yet worked out of it creates more CO2 than gas fired generation per say, or more than that generated moving recycled stuff around the UK (and/or globe!).
It looks pretty funky, which is I’m sure very relevant if it forms part of the view from your house, given the general not in my backyard view on these sorts of things.
