The truth about recycling
As the importance of recycling becomes more apparent, questions about it linger. Is it worth the effort? How does it work? Is recycling waste just going into a landfill in China? Here are some answers
Reuters
IT IS an awful lot of rubbish. Since 1960 the amount of municipal waste being collected in America has nearly tripled, reaching 245m tonnes in 2005. According to European Union statistics, the amount of municipal waste produced in western Europe increased by 23% between 1995 and 2003, to reach 577kg per person. (So much for the plan to reduce waste per person to 300kg by 2000.) As the volume of waste has increased, so have recycling efforts. In 1980 America recycled only 9.6% of its municipal rubbish; today the rate stands at 32%. A similar trend can be seen in Europe, where some countries, such as Austria and the Netherlands, now recycle 60% or more of their municipal waste. Britain's recycling rate, at 27%, is low, but it is improving fast, having nearly doubled in the past three years.
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very interesting article about the current state and the history of recycling, as well as the future of recycling. This last part I consider even more interesting, since dealing with the problem at the source is often a good idea, in this case: produce less rubbish or better recyclable rubbish....
I worked in a supermarket for some time (and this one went to some effort to prevent useless packaging etc, so it may be even worse in others), and the amount of packaging on a product is really enormous: products arive in boxes on carts. In these boxes, products are packaged 1, 2, 3 or more products inside one bigger package (this bundling makes people buy more stuff), while each of these packages has a "shell" of it's own. In each individual packages, there are sometimes smaller packages with eg 2 or 3 biscuits (for "freshness"), sometimes even going to the extend of packaging the indicvidual biscuits in these 2-3 biscuit packages... This means some products have up to 6 layers of packaging (and I was counting mostly cardboard, sometimes there are some extra plastic wrappers etc).... I don't think this is really necessary....