Environment
From "Maple Street Co-op News", Apr/May 2007

DIY Climate Repair Part 1: Recycling
by Co-op member Autumn River

Our era is distinguished by top-level concerns about global warming and climate change, paradoxically coupled with the equally top-level vacillation on the issue. There is an apparent hesitation on the part of politicians to take bold and decisive action to prevent the projected ecological and humanitarian disasters facing us in the not-too-distant future if the “business as usual course”, as Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, calls it, continues to take precedence.

In Hansen’s report “A Threat to the Planet”, he pronounces: “...the eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable to those at the time of mass extinctions. Life will survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet. For all foreseeable human generations, it will be a far more desolate world than the one in which civilisation developed and flourished during the past several thousand years.”

In the face of Hansen’s and countless other premonitions, it is easy for the ordinary person to feel disempowered. Witness, for example, Prime Minister John Howard’s recent statement that he would “be careful Australians don’t get panicked into instant responses to climate change” (The Daily Telegraph, 14 November, 2006).

But while politicians pussyfoot around, there is no reason why we should do the same at home. Climate change, perhaps more than any other issue, warrants the bumper sticker catchcry, “Think globally, act locally”. After all, it is arguably the net carbon that matters in the scheme of things, not whether it came from a corporate smoke-stack or humble citizen’s car exhaust pipe. And with Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) findings that you and I contribute, directly and indirectly, to 56 per cent of annual carbon emissions, there is a real case for stating the problem is largely in the hands of ordinary folk.

In this and following articles I will examine how ordinary households collectively sponsor more than half of the nation’s ‘dirty donations’ to the global warming phenomenon, and what simple actions you and I can take to ‘shrink our share of the stink’. In this edition, we’ll look at recycling.

Realities of recycling
Municipal recycling boasts a more than 30-year history in Australia, with a slow but enthusiastic spread from a primitive Canterbury Council, Sydney, program in 1975 to the high-tech, highly viable nationwide industry it has become today. Thanks largely to the persistent grassroots nagging of ratepayers, most municipalities in Australia currently provide some sort of recycling service to households, the combined national effect of which annually recovers approximately $912 million of commodity value and saves a staggering 68,400 gigawatt hours of energy-expenditure every year.

The environmental benefits of recycling are incontestable; however, there is still a long way to go according to Planet Ark. The organisation’s annual Roy Morgan poll in combination with ABS figures consistently demonstrates the disparity between ‘ideal’ and ‘actuality’ when it comes to distinguishing citizen attitudes from real-world practices at the level of the kitchen tidy bin.

While 95–96 per cent of Aussies are happy to pay lip-service to the notion of recycling, as few as seven per cent ‘put their rubbish where their mouth is’ and routinely isolate every type of recyclable (including food and garden scraps, which can be turned into backyard compost, and unwanted clothes, which can be re-used as household rags or donated to charity) from landfill-destined domestic waste.

The first citizen ‘carbon credit’ action we can take is to cultivate precise recycling habits, yet landfill-prevention is only half of the equation. According to the ABS, landfill emissions contribute only 0.5 per cent of Australia’s annual total citizen-caused global-warming pollution, while the ‘embodied energy’ of waste, i.e. the energy consumed in its original manufacture, is responsible for 9.5 per cent. While it has been speculated that the mainly methane emissions of rubbish tips, with 20 times the atmospheric-warming potential of carbon, put landfill on equal par with factory pollution, the arch offenders are the manufacturers who create the rubbish to begin with, releasing the documented carbon in the process.

Pertinently for consumers, the term ‘recycling’ only achieves its full and proper meaning in the consideration of where all those cans, bottles and reams of paper originally came from, as opposed to where they are going. Recycling is not about simply lifting the yellow lid of the recycling bin and feeling good about preventing landfill. It is all about resource recovery, about feeding back into the production lines the ready-processed materials of which most of our rubbish is valuably constituted, and about mitigating the need for the carbon-intensive and ecologically damaging production of identical materials from virgin substrates.

Aluminium is possibly the most striking example of recycling’s inherent efficiency. The energy used to make one can from virgin bauxite is equivalent to about 20 cans produced from the recycled alternative. The logical economic part of this equation is that manufacturers overwhelmingly prefer to source recycled aluminium. Yet Australians still annually throw out approximately 100 million cans, says Planet Ark, equal to $15 million worth of industry-coveted scrap metal.

Other figures, too, do not reflect well on the nation’s recycling credentials: nine out of every 10 pieces of waste paper every year end up buried in the ground (Merino, maker of Safe recycled-paper toilet tissue, has recently had to resort to importing scrap paper from overseas), as do an estimated two-thirds of Australia’s recyclable glass products.

While the causes of these figures vary, according to Planet Ark, from plain citizen laziness to widespread domestic confusion about what and what not to put in recycling bins, the problem must owe at least as much to the absence of recycling services in public places (such as Maple Street). Perhaps we should all let Councillor Dick Newman know that we would like the recycling option in our CBD. In the meantime, we can take our rubbish home and make sure we recycle it correctly. Following are Caloundra City Council’s recycling guidelines*:

What can be recycled
• Aluminium and other disposable metallic goods, including cans, tins, foil (but not plastic imitation foil, such as chip packets, tea-packaging etc.), pie dishes, aerosols, paint tins. To facilitate recycling efficiency, quickly rinse food particles from containers, remove plastic lids and nozzles from aerosols, and allow remnant paint in paint tins to dry.

• Plastics numbers 1–6, as located on the bottom or side of plastic item. In general, this includes most household plastics, e.g., milk and soft drink bottles, yoghurt containers, meat trays, etc., although since there are always ‘masquerading’ exceptions, residents should confirm the presence of a number (sometimes small and inconspicuous) before disposing of plastics in the recycling bin, or else check with the manufacturer. Again, quickly rinse any food particles from containers and, if possible, remove all lids, rings and labels.

• Food-grade transparent glass, all colours; paper and cardboard, including newspapers, magazines and all forms of loose waste paper; cardboard boxes, packaging and rolls (but not food-contaminated items). Flatten boxes and, where possible, remove excess sticky tape. Tie all paper products into a neat bundle.

What can’t be recycled
Do not put plastic bags or plastic bags full of recyclables in the recycling bin. This interferes with the sorting process and significantly multiplies the likelihood of your recyclables going to landfill.

Do not place non-food glass, i.e., window glass, broken drinking glasses, sunglasses, microwave oven dishes, Pyrex glass, light bulbs, etc, opaque glass and broken crockery items in the recycling bin. Glass products that can presently be recycled are limited to transparent food-grade commercial jars and bottles only (all colours permitted). Non-recyclable glass and crockery contamination has the potential to spoil entire batches of recyclable glass, resulting in the whole lot being consigned to landfill.

Getting into the recycling groove
It is no exacting task to ‘do the right thing’ in an age of separate and distinct waste-collection services. Furthermore, the very easy-to-assimilate recycling habit clearly has a significant role to play in reducing citizen-caused carbon contributions.

To put this article in the perspective of the bigger climatic picture, former US Vice-President Al Gore estimates that households can prevent approximately one tonne of carbon emissions per year through committing fully and faithfully to the recycling habit. And every recovered item counts, as calculations by the NSW Department of Environment and Conservation demonstrate: “Every 10 tonnes of extra recycling we can recover is equivalent to taking an extra four cars off the road permanently, the annual electricity requirements for 14.5 households, and saves enough water to fill 3.5 average backyard swimming pools.”†

In view of Planet Ark’s finding that the bulk of the nation’s recycling bins are utilised, at best, half-heartedly, it is perhaps wise to leave off with an exhortation to self-examination. For the future of this planet, for the future of our children, are you recycling dutifully? It may be one of the many tolls of global warming that ignorance and laissez-faire attitudes can no longer be excused, no matter how sincerely our politicians model such complacency.

Next edition, we will view the decidedly more ugly side of our ‘throw-away’ society: the landfill problem and its effect on global warming, and what actions we can individually take to offset this predicament.

* Recycling rules may differ from council to council. Residents outside of CCC areas are advised to confirm recycling guidelines with their own council authorities.

† This calculation includes the negligible emissions released by the transport and reprocessing of recyclables.

Sources:
• www.nybooks.com/articles/19131
• www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph
• www.abs.gov.au/AUSTATS
• www.planetark.com/nrw/media/NRW_RecyclingMythsReport.pdf
• www.planetark.com/nrw/media/load_of_rubbish.pdf
• www.planetark.com/nrw/media/05nrw_gbugly_report.pdf
• www.caloundra.qld.gov.au

[From "Maple Street Co-op News", Apr/May 2007; published by The Street Co-operative Society Ltd, 37 Maple Street, Maleny, Qld 4552, Australia, tel (07) 5494 2088, email maplest.coop@ serv.net.au,
website http://www.maplestreetco-op.com.au]