Recycle-get this… (Photo credit: practicalowl)
Every year Scotland chucks out 5 million tonnes of waste. This is not all domestic waste but rubbish from shops, office buildings, factories etc. This leads to pollution in our environment and the filling up landfill sites.
We need to use the planet’s resources more carefully, reduce the waste we create, re-use it, recycle more and throw less away. The Scottish Parliament want to some ideas on how to become a “zero waste” society. WWF Scotland have a campaign going to help collate your responses and an email action where you can edit a template email before sending it to the Parliament.
WWF Scotland’s campaign is to encourage a big cut in the amount of unnecessary rubbish that we send to landfill along with the suggestion of a ban on free single-use carrier bags, reduce unnecessary packaging and bring back nationwide deposit and return schemes, where the price of valuable materials like glass bottles includes a deposit which people can get back when they return them.
I have completed the email but removed the section on plastic bags. The reason is that I feel plastic bag manufacturers are doing something about making their bags more degradable. Last year I lifted (or tried to) a Co-operative Food plastic bag that had a tin of paint in out from my boxroom where it had been lying for around 18 months. As I lifted it the bag disintegrated into bits, just as it said it would do on the bag.
I agree with reducing the amount of rubbish we create. I’d like to see even more of it recycled but, the biggest problem with this is the huge variation in what items you can recycle in different parts of the country. For example, bottle tops can be recycled in some areas not others, tetrapaks can be taken to “bring” schemes in some places but not in recycling boxes. There is a need for conformity in this area to help improve domestic recycling rates and make it easier for people.
More effort needs to be made by business to reduce the amount of packaging used and to only use materials that can be easily recycled.
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