Rubbish | News & Views

Scotland launches zero waste campaign

The Scottish government has launched a new campaign encouraging households to recycle more of their waste.

Its new report into recycling rates in Scotland has shown that 67 percent of newspapers and magazines and 60 percent of glass is being reused.

However, Scottish households are still throwing around 260 kilograms of recyclable waste away each year.

The Zero Waste campaign will aim to tackle this by educating consumers about the materials they can recycle and where.

It will feature television, radio and outdoor advertisements, as well as a nationwide road show featuring the campaign’s mascot – a ten-foot tall blue elephant.

Scottish environment secretary Richard Lochhead said: “We should all constantly challenge ourselves to recycle more items, more often.

“Most waste sent to landfill should be viewed as a resource and put to good use,” he remarked.

The Zero Waste report shows that overall recycling rates in Scotland have increased from five percent of household waste ten years ago to almost 36 percent today.

>>> Please read the full article here

UK beaches swamped by plastic litter, say campaigners

UK beaches are being ruined by an ever-accumulating tide of plastic litter, the Marine Conservation Society says.
Volunteers at 400 beaches collected 1,849 items of litter per kilometre in the weekend of the MCS’s 2009 survey and 63% of it was plastic, it said.
It said the amount of rubbish was 77% higher than in 1994 – its first annual survey – and the proportion of plastic volunteers found had never been higher.

However, the overall amount of litter collected was down on 2008. The MCS says plastic is unsightly and harmed marine animals. A spokeswoman said the figures showed plastic makes up an increasing proportion of beach litter – now nearly two-thirds of the total.

She said a 16% drop in litter collected since last year’s findings was a small trough in an overall upward trend.
She added there had been calm weather in the run up to September, when the latest survey took place.

The survey involved more than 4,600 volunteers, each of whom went to their favourite beach over one weekend. Altogether, they collected 2,742 rubbish bags of waste.
The haul included 7,393 plastic bags, 16,243 plastic drinks bottles, 17,712 fishing nets and 70,546 small plastic pieces.

Among the rubbish were a laboratory incubator, syringes, nappies, half a boomerang, a message in a bottle from “Sly Sally”; a joke severed finger and a set of fake vampire’s teeth.

The biggest source of waste was public littering, followed by both commercial and recreational fishing. The MCS spokeswoman said the beaches with the most litter were in the South West of England. She said this because they were closer to shipping lanes and had a higher number of tourists.

“Plastic does not biodegrade but breaks down into small pieces that will last for hundreds if not thousands of years. In parts of our oceans there are now six times more plastic particles in the water than plankton,” she added.
“No-one has been alive long enough to know how long this litter is going to last.

MCS litter projects officer Rachel Bailey said: “Our seas and beaches are becoming overwhelmed with plastic litter, which not only looks horrible, but kills and injures many of our fantastic marine animals every year.
“Over 260 species of marine wildlife become entangled in litter or mistake it for food.

>>> Please read the full article here

>>> Take a look at Eco Pic of the Day’s ‘Farewell Plastikl!‘ article

>>> Check out Eco Pic of the Day’s Eco pictures

Litter: our legacy to future generations

By Jeremy Paxman

Our grandchildren will know us by our discarded cans of Coca-Cola and packets of Walkers crisps

It’s the real thing, all right. That plastic jewel glinting in the verge among the emerging daffodils is a plastic bottle. Probably an empty Coke one.

An organisation called Litter Heroes (surely the most unglamorous club in Britain?) has done something rather useful. They have traced where the crud that morons in cars chuck out of their windows originally comes from. No surprise to discover that the worst-offending brand is Coca-Cola (4.9% of all litter), followed by Walkers Crisps (4.1%) and McDonald’s (3.6%).

And what does Coca-Cola say by way of apology? A company spokesman “acknowledges” the report. How very gracious of him. He goes on to blather that its bottles “carry the Tidy Man and Recycle Now logos”. Well, that should do it.

There is more fatuous wittering from McDonald’s, which even has the nerve to attempt a tone of wronged outrage, saying that “in 2009 we spent over ¬£2m on staff labour alone” picking up litter. That’s ¬£2m out of a turn over of more than ¬£2bn in Britain.

Anyone who walks anywhere in this filthy country knows that what the 39 volunteers from Litter Heroes discovered is true. No one in their right mind talks any longer about a “green and pleasant land”. A beautiful country is being submerged under a rising tide of rubbish.

Worst of all is the fact that whereas paper bags biodegrade, plastic bottles and confectionery wrappers last for generations. Our great-grandchildren will still be living among the gaudy wrapping of the chocolate bar we excreted last month.

The poor saps who have to act as apologists for the fizzy-drink and junk-food manufacturers never use the obvious argument because it would ¬≠insult their customers. Why don’t they try the tactic of US gun ¬≠manufacturers, who say: “It’s not guns that kill, it’s people”? Of course, it’s not the boss of Coke or Cadbury chucking the company products out of the car window; it’s some oaf who doesn’t understand that in tidying up his private space he’s making the shared space filthy.

The turning of verges into rubbish tips is a symptom of the “everyone for himself” attitude that has come to dominate in the last 50 years. What can we do? Local councils are supposed to have a statutory duty to clear up litter, but are largely useless. Ditto the national government. The fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves. At least future generations won’t lack evidence of the kind of people we were.

Read the full article at the guardian website

Plastic rubbish blights Atlantic Ocean

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News, Portland

The SSV Corwith Cramer is involved in the plastics research.

Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.
The region is said to compare with the well-documented “great Pacific garbage patch”.
Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been “largely ignored” in the Atlantic.

She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.
The work is the conclusion of the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin.
Scientists and students from the SEA collected plastic and marine debris in fine mesh nets that were towed behind a research vessel.

We know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular
Dr Kara Lavender Law, Sea Education Association
The nets dragged along were half-in and half-out of the water, picking up debris and small marine organisms from the sea surface.

The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic – off the coast of the US. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface.
These were pieces of low-density plastic that are used to make many consumer products, including plastic bags.
Dr Lavender Law said that the pieces of plastic she and her team picked up in the nets were generally very small – up to 1cm across.

“We found a region fairly far north in the Atlantic Ocean where this debris appears to be concentrated and remains over long periods of time,” she explained.
“More than 80% of the plastic pieces we collected in the tows were found between 22 and 38 degrees north. So we have a latitude for [where this] rubbish seems to accumulate,” she said.

The maximum “plastic density” was 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre.
“That’s a maximum that is comparable with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Dr Lavender Law.
But she pointed out that there was not yet a clear estimate of the size of the patches in either the Pacific or the Atlantic.
“You can think of it in a similar way [to the Pacific Garbage Patch], but I think the word ‘patch’ can be misleading. This is widely dispersed and it’s small pieces of plastic,” she said.
The impacts on the marine environment of the plastics were still unknown, added the researcher.
“But we know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular,” she told BBC News.

Nets are dragged half-in and half-out of the water

Nikolai Maximenko from University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the study, said that it was very important to continue the research to find out the impacts of plastic on the marine ecosystem.
He told BBC News: “We don’t know how much is consumed by living organisms; we don’t have enough data.
“I think this is a big target for the next decade – a global network to observe plastics in the ocean.”

Read the full article at bbc news

Environment Agency Reveals New Weapon Against Waste Crime

An innovative technology that can map what’s buried underground is being used by the agency to search for waste 203_environment_agency_203x152 buried illegally, and make sure the polluter pays for its clean up.
The new technology will add to the armoury of CSI-style techniques used by the Environment Agency to tackle serious waste criminals. It will be used alongside sophisticated techniques including forensics, handwriting analysis and Smartwater tracking by a dedicated national environmental crime team.

Since 2008 the Environment Agency has closed 1,500 illegal waste sites, and fines for committing waste offences have doubled since 2003, from £1.4million to over £3million. But the Agency estimates that there are still approximately 800 illegal sites currently in operation and new technologies are vital tools in shutting them down. Illegal waste sites and organised criminal flytipping operations cost businesses and taxpayers millions of pounds every year to clean up.

Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, Dr Paul Leinster, said: “This is just one of the many state of the art technologies that the Environment Agency uses to make sure that waste criminals are caught, prosecuted and made to pay for the clean up of the land they have polluted.
“By dumping waste illegally, waste criminals avoid landfill charges and undercut legitimate waste businesses, but more importantly they put the environment and human health at risk. We are making sure that waste crime does not pay, and have set up specialist crime teams to catch criminals and confiscate the assets they’ve gained from crime.”

See the full article at environment-agency.gov.uk