Recycling has been with us a long time now – but keep it up! In fact, as the old quarries and other assorted holes in the ground get filled up recycling is more and more important.
We still need to reduce the amount of waste going to land fill.
It’s better to re-use unwanted items. You can take re-usable furniture, for instance, to the Household Waste Sites – and you buy things there too.
It’s not just about the growing scarcity of landfill sites – we need to recover materials and we need to recover the energy locked up in them. Metals in particular need a huge amount of energy to produce them – but far less to melt scrap metal for re-use. It’s much the same with glass and plastic. And paper can become cardboard, and cardboard can become compost.
Compostable material is especially useful. Britain’s farmland is intensively used and the productive structure of the soil has to be conserved. What goes into our green bins becomes valuable soil conditioner to keep the farms productive.
Residual waste that can’t be recycled still occurs, however. Much of this is comprised of low grade composite materials like laminated paper and cardboard, or waste collections too mixed up to separate. Nowadays these can go to clean, modern EfW (Energy from Waste)plants like the one at Chineham near Reading or Lakeside near Slough that can safely produce electricity to cut down on coal and oil. RDF (Refuse Derived Fuel) produced by MBT plants (Mechanical and Biological Treatment) like the one at Frog Island near Dagenham can be used to produce cement. Best of all, however, are the AD (Anaerobic Digesters) plants like the one near Baldock which can take food, farm and agricultural waste and turn these into biogas good enough for the gas grid or as a fuel for diesel engines to produce electricity.
So you see, waste is to valuable to waste! Re-use it or recycle it – and keep up the good work.