Recycling: Far from a waste of time

Recycling has become a huge issue politically, ethically and environmentally. Lorna Gledhill asks whether it is worth all the hassle

By Lorna Gledhill

Modern life functions on a very careful balance of production and consumption. As a society, we happily take up the role of the gluttonous consumer who insatiably eats their way through the products of the earth. We gorge ourselves on mountains of food, clothes and other stuff, but we’re getting a little chubby around the edges. In fact, we’re heading towards morbid obesity.

    Continual consumption, by its very nature, runs parallel to a steady increase in waste products; heaps of products very quickly become equivalent mountains of waste as we hastily discard the old for the new. Our planet is fast becoming the mountain of waste.  
    According to DEFRA (Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), the average British citizen sent 295 kilograms of household waste to landfill in 2008/2009. In the average five-person student house in Leeds, this amounts to 1,475 kilograms per year. The residual waste of solely University of Leeds students can be calculated at 8,997,500 kilograms in 2008/2009, despite government recycling schemes.  
    These tonnes of waste are left stagnant in landfills, building up year upon year despite independent groups claiming that up to 60% of all waste sent to landfill could actually be recycled. The process of recycling is crucial to help combat and curtail the effects of our incessantly consumptive lifestyle. It allows us to conserve what we have already consumed and keep original products in the circle of consumption for a considerably longer time. Whether it’s food, clothing or electrical items, recycling previously discarded products allows us to treat our waste as a valuable resource in a productive rather than destructive manner.
    There’s a common myth often drawn upon by environmentally retrogressive political parties that plagues any conservation driven ideas. In general, people seem to believe that it’s not easy to be green, and that any environmentally positive changes are tiresome, troublesome and expensive. It is this type of negative mindset that needs to be revoked in order to create a positive change.  
    A recent survey of University of Leeds students highlights that whilst 40.7% of respondents felt that recycling was ‘very important’, less than one fifth recycled everything that could actually be recycled. Almost 50% of respondents were unaware of which plastics the council recycled in Leeds, but around a third of respondents stated that they would recycle more if they knew what could be recycled. In fact, it is only difficult to be green when you don’t have the right information to help you along the way.
    Once the logistics are sorted out, ‘being green’ does not become a drastic lifestyle choice, but a simple and efficient way to dispose of waste.
    Paying attention to recycling does not mean that you have to be an obsessive-compulsive bin filterer. In fact, the whole ideology of reducing waste and reusing discarded products is a great deal more exciting. Green Streets, is a Leeds based organisation that reclaims abandoned items left by students at the end of each academic year. They have created a free shop, which redistributes other peoples’ waste to new consumers.  At the end of last year, volunteers acquired 1297 pairs of shoes, about 1000 bags of clothes, 262 saucepans and even a rabbit hutch.
    Kim Cooper, Green Streets co-ordinator said: “ If people are involved in more direct recycling like free shops they are made more aware of the situation and are taking a proactive role in reducing waste.  The education side to free shops are just as important as the actual reusing of goods.”
    Equally, there has been a birth of a whole new consumer system in which recycled goods have re-entered the purchasing stream as desired products. From vintage clothes to fabric carrier bags, recycled goods are becoming acceptable new commodities, helping to erase what waste operatives have dubbed the ‘Primark effect’ of huge quantities of cheap and disposable products.  
    While we may be changing our attitudes towards commodious shopping, it still remains that 10 million tonnes of packaging enters the UK waste stream every year. This is mainly from food produce. While our use of disposable plastic carrier bags may have dropped by almost a quarter from 2007, the food which we carry in our reusable bags is still swamped in plastics that can take up to 500 years to decompose. The Waste Resource Action Programme’s research states that up to a third of all food bought in the UK ends up being thrown away, and Leeds City Council estimates that Leeds itself wastes around 70,000 tonnes of food every year.  
    However, we need not drown in our own waste. Composting is an efficient way of preventing food waste from going to landfill, while buying unpackaged fruit and vegetables severely reduces the amount of un-recyclable plastics entering the waste stream. Local greengrocers are often not only cheaper than supermarkets but also provide a greater selection of unpackaged foods, allowing you to easily avoid the plastic-filled supermarkets.  
    There is no longer a question about the ‘usefulness’ of recycling; as part of a modern consumer run economy, it is essential. For that very reason, it is the consumer that holds the power to enforce changes in both ideological and consumer aspects. Whilst consumption and conservation are hard to marry in modern society, they cannot be mutually exclusive. Recycling is vital, and if we, as the consumer, start to limit our consumption and manage our waste through recycling, the necessary conservation of our planet need not evade our grasp.