Seen from spaaaaace: Boffins check world's oceans for plastic European Space Agency (ESA) scientists plan to use satellite shortwave infrared (SWIR) sensing to detect plastic litter concentrations in the oceans. Because tiny fragments of plastic are impossible to identify by current orbital imaging technology, detecting the spectral signature of plastic represents a promising alternative …
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Not a bad idea!
I would go for that, in addition, instead of billig people for taking recycling to a recycling facilty (no joke, they do charge you if you take it in yourself) pay them for taking it in.
Call it a reward scheme, people will do stuff for rewards. If someone feela they get no benefit for doing something their less likely to do it.
As for fishermen, they would do that if they know they can get paid for it (in addition to their regular catch).
The question is though, who pays? Tax payer?
@JakeMS:
Precisely. I've always been baffled why I pay council tax etc. and then have to wash, scrub, crush, sort, bag and separate plastics, paper, food, etc. only for them to come along in four different trucks, throw it all on the back, extract everything with value (gosh, the councillor responsible for waste happens to own a waste recycling company that the council happen to use? How fortunate!), and then almost certainly landfill everything else, or on the slightest excuse of "contamination" (i.e. if your recycling machine for a milk carton can't handle a bit of residue milk, it's probably time to get a new machine).
The benefit to me of recycling is... what, precisely? Not getting told off, that's about it. Now if you offered even a 50p-per-bin full of recycled paper, plastic, etc. (all the easy stuff), people might actually bother to do something. That will add up and go some way to pay for the time and effort (not to mention hot water, bins, bin-bags, etc.). And if we could avoid the logistics-Nazis at the recycling plant, that would be great.
Fact is, you tax things you DON'T want people doing. And you subsidise things you do want people doing.
Hence tax plastic use on packaging. And subsidise people to recycle their plastic. If you do it right, one will pay for the other and you get a double-whammy effect on the actual use of plastics.
But... that would leave no room for middle-men to take their 10% so it won't happen.
Wow Lee, one minute then I thought I was reading the Daily Mail comments.
1. Recycling itmes of worth helps pay for the collection.
2. Cleaning and sorting? Depends on your council, ours you through all recycling into a single bin and let the machines do the work. However the cleaning is NOT so your plastic tubs or tins are cleaning, it's to stop paper and card being contaminated (see below).
3. Dirty paper requires more chemical bleaching and is often unusable. It also requires more manual intervention as the automated machines cannot process the material easily.
4. The benefit of plastic recycling is the amount of landfill is reduced and fines for councils failing to meet those targets are not passed onto the tax payer. Also define how much you would pay? Per bin liner? Well 1/2 dozen milk bottles will do that, but several hundred bottle tops. By weight? Plastic weighs nothing in comparison to wet newspaper.
5. "The rest is put in landfill". Well for starters more and more are using incinerators (that then provide electricty or heat) and if muppets actually realised that a McDonalds milkshake can't be recycled if it's still half full, then less would have to go in recycling.
The issue is not we don't recycle well, the issue is there is to much packaging in the first place.
...Fact is, you tax things you DON'T want people doing. And you subsidise things you do want people doing....
Fact is, you tax things that are vaguely associated with actions which are disapproved by activists. And you subsidise things that the activists get a warm feeling about.
The taxes often cause non-intuitive impacts which make whatever problem you are addressing worse. And the subsidies create a sub-industry of activists whose jobs depend on continuing to find that the problem is 'getting worse. Please send more money'.
We're shipping that stuff to China:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/02/rubbish-already-building-up-at-uk-recycling-plants-due-to-china-import-ban
I'm not against recycling, I'm against why **I'M** doing it at my own cost instead of the people paid to do it. Tax the products, subsidise the recyclers, and use tax to perform essential functions (and given that waste disposal is now waste disposal and recycling, that's one of them).
Additionally, half of things that could be AREN'T recycled at all. We're not even doing it very well. Then we're running 4 trucks instead of 1 to every house - totally killing the environmental advantages. 4 jobs instead of 1 might be helpful but there goes all my tax again. Then it only costs £86 a tonne in tax to landfill. That's a pittance for general compressed household waste.
And at the end of the day, the "recycling" is happening in China (if it's happening at all, we can't really prove it and there have been experiments with GPS trackers on household waste and WEEE, finding out that most of it ends up in foreign landfill anyway) - by shipping millions of tonnes around the world on diesel-burning ships because the local landfill tax makes the council baulk unless they get their percentage.
Don't make me out to be the villain. It's like asking me to buy my own light-bulbs for the streetlamps in my street, telling me I fitted the wrong one, then making me buy an energy-inefficient one and fitting it myself, making me pay the electric bill (while also paying council tax), then fitting four other lamps of different bulbs to every lamp post and then blaming me if anyone ever falls over in the dark. When I just work 9-5 on a completely different job.
There's social responsibility, and then there's taking the piss.
"You do wash yourself, don't shit on the street, piss in the pool, I wonder why."
But I don't run my personal police force, have my own fire truck, hire my own doctors and hospital bed, operate and funds local social welfare organisation,service the town hall, repair the road, build new housing or lots of other things.
And those things my council tax HAS ALWAYS PAID FOR, and states that. Like waste management. But my council tax has never claimed to wipe my backside for me.
A council-run service has been privatised (I'm being asked to buy THEIR bags, THEIR bins and anything outside the limits is an extra cost to take away my green bin, etc.), in the process adding in a whole raft of extra things that need doing that never used to - I'm actually paying MORE than I was when those things weren't necessary, and I'm required to do those things, at my expense, on top while the council-run service via a private contractors does... what exactly? Picks it up, doesn't have to sort it, profits from it and there's no guarantee that difference ever goes back to the council (in fact, I guarantee you it doesn't, as I investigated my local councillor and his waste-management company for exactly that).
It's a con to cream off council services for personal gain, using fake "green" credentials, and push ordinary service expenditure to the householder outside of the taxation arrangements. If you haven't realised that, you honestly haven't looked at your local council's register of declared interests.
You can either a) tax me and provide those necessary services and force me to utilise them or b) allow me to choose any independent entity I wish to do the same job (waste DOES need to be disposed of) and not pay the council for that service at all.
What they WANT me to do is pay council tax to provide that service, then charge me / impose extra work upon me for that necessary service.
Charge me a bit more and sort the waste. Charge me a bit more and wash the waste. Charge me a bit more and give me free bins/bags. Charge me a bit more and collect unrecycled rubbish daily.
But don't charge me the same service as always and then make me pay/work to make your job profitable for you and you alone.
P.S. when was the last time your council tax DIDN'T increase by the legal maximum 2.99% (or whatever it is).
Councils should be centrally funded, but only consist of one man with a phone to send out private pothole repair companies, streetlight repair companies, etc.
Police, fire, etc should be centrally funded and ran. Same too with anything other than minor road repair.
Bin collection should be a mandatory service, with each area sold to contracting companies, but with each resident able to procure their own service.
"Wouldnt it just be easier to charge for removal of non recyclables?"
Sounds like you're suggesting some form of bin tax imposed by the council. Whatever would we call it?
As a side our local council decided to start charging an additional £30 a year for garden waste... But don't worry, they're not putting council tax up.
As a side our local council decided to start charging an additional £30 a year for garden waste... But don't worry, they're not putting council tax up.
Good. Make the producers of "green waste" find somewhere for it. If they won't compost or reuse at home, and can't find a hedgerow where it can decompose in the natural way, let them pay.
"Good. Make the producers of "green waste" find somewhere for it. If they won't compost or reuse at home, and can't find a hedgerow where it can decompose in the natural way, let them pay"
Im pretty sure it will decompose really well on the landfill site that the non-recyclable waste goes to... Because thats where everyone's sending it now.
"The question is though, who pays? Tax payer?"
Put a tax on it when it's sold, if you return it then you get that money back. Companies selling plastic products will want to keep the sale price down so they will reduce the amount of plastic in their products (if it's done by weight) and collecting discarded plastic can become a profitable exercise if you can do it at scale. Plenty of places currently do that for aluminium cans and there are vanishingly few that make it through to landfill since there is cash to be had for collecting it.
"You think there's a limit on how much plastic fishermen can catch?"
No, it was a joke that regulations would need to be changed. For starters you need a licence specifically for carrying waste on land. There's also likely to be hazardous waste laws and health and safety to contend with too.
In the US they pay for your cans and bottles. Over here we just punish people who don't use the bin and charge even more to then sort them in the way of council tax. It makes no sense.
The catch is, much of the stuff turned in for "recycling" ends up in the ocean or landfills. We're better equipped to make and distributed the stuff than we are to gather it together and recycle/reprocess it. It's not just bottles but trash bags, product wraps, etc. The "other stuff" far outweighs the bottle problem.
...when pop (soda for our US cousins) was sold in glass bottles? And part of the cost was a deposit. Upon returning the bottle, you got the deposit back.
So why not do the same with plastic ones?
And whilst we're at it, why not charge supermarkets and their suppliers for the amount of plastics they use? Or off them breaks if they can use alternatives?
In a vaguely related note, it always annoys me when I hear the odd rumble in the likes of the press about the idea of charging households for the amount of waste they create...how about stopping it at source first?
Once we've begun to tackle these things, we can start to think about how we can begin to get rid of the vast amounts of it already in our oceans.
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"But politicians in Westminster have been more cautious amid lobbying by drinks manufacturers and fears from small shops about the administrative burden."
There you go. We were perhaps in danger of doing something sensible, but Westminster has saved the day yet again.
Here in NSW (Oz) they have just implemented (badly) a scheme to provide a refund on (some) liquid containers. (sort of copying the scheme currently operating in another state)
I say badly as they have been very specific about what containers they want recycled, so things like milk bottles, wine bottles, spirit bottles - as well as any non-liquid holding container isnt included.
The scheme gives the recycler back 10c on each container accepted.
There has been a lot of negative press though because (naturally) the suppliers, retailers etc have put their prices up - not just to cover the deposit, but also to cover the changes in systems and processing that required in order to be able to report to government & scheme operators, as well as to pay for the recycling machines, transportation of containers etc.
I would see this as the starting point of changing people's perception of what needs to be recycled and would hope that it would slowly grow to include all containers, but dont see any political interest in that happening.
Here in the states there is a charge (and it's printed on each bottle) that they call a "deposit". But returning them is not easy as dropping them off at the grocery store since the places (supermarkets) we used to drop off the bottles have closed and "centralized" out in the boondocks. Takes some effort to find the place.
Some of us have questioned "who gets the deposit" on the unreturned bottles? I'm sure if we follow the money, we'll find out why they've made recycling more difficult.
There are serious medical issues related to people handling food and recycled containers. Check out levels of hepatitis in Columbia Missouri (which has a can deposit) vs the areas around it which don't. There have been documented cases of MRSA being transmitted though recycling schemes and the grocery store staff just aren't trained enough for it not to cause health problems.
Around here cans and glass bottles pay for the rest of the recycling. Cardboard can be profitably recycled if there are enough cans and bottles to pay for the expensive sorting machines. If you remove them from the cash flow, nothing else is going to get recycled without great expense that the tax payers won't put up with. Everyone who is willing to deal with plastic bottles wants the cans and glass and those require not having a bottle deposit rule. Modern sorting equipment is very good at dealing with the standard plastic coke bottles and sorting the milk ones into a second process but the raw plastic isn't worth much except as a fuel. The bulk systems are far more efficient than the vending machine used in Norway and can cope with far more types of recycling.
I've seen little evidence that anyone is even the slightest bit interested in actually, effectively, efficiently addressing the issue.
(An exception is when jurisdictions wisely eliminate those unnecessary plastic micro-beads in cosmetic products, a move that makes perfect sense considering that alternative ocean-friendly abrasive particles are readily available.)
If anyone was actually interested, then they'd pay some attention to the origin (country, river) where this rubbish is coming from. BBC recently reported that 90% of the oceans' plastic comes from just ten rivers, and just some of them dominate. Hint: It's not the St. Lawrence.
For less than 20% of the effort, they could almost immediately solve more than 80% of the source. Not overnight, but certainly within a year or two. But nobody can be bothered. They'd rather ban plastic shopping bags in landlocked jurisdictions, because they can only think as far as they can see.
The environmental movement needs to hire a manager. Somebody with some common sense.
Now, excuse me. I've got to go. I have to drive 35km down to the ocean to toss in all my old plastic shopping bags. Otherwise there wouldn't be any connection; and I do like to do my part.
BBC recently reported that 90% of the oceans' plastic comes from just ten rivers
And surprise, surprise, the indications are that the fastest developing nations are the main cause. Maybe their remarkable economic growth hasn't been matched at all by the civil infrastructure needed to handle waste (amongst other infrastructure woes)?
I can't offer any remedies, other than to observe that offshoring of either white collar or manufacturing has a major influence here. There's a reason these places have lower payroll and corporate taxes.....
I noticed a couple of comments about bacteria that eat plastic, I guess that's okay then we can all continue to chuck plastics into the sea so that we can swap all the other sealife for an ocean of happy gooey plastic eating bacteria.
I used to do a bit of sailing in the Med' a while back, usually in Summer just before dawn the sea is flat with a mirror like surface, when you are sailing on auto-steer and standing watch there's not a lot to look at in the middle of the ocean other than the ocean. That pre-dawn glassy surface enables you to see that everywhere you look the sea surface has tiny bits of plastic every few centimetres, over just the surface of the med I can't imagine how many tons of plastic is floating around let alone what has sunk to the bottom and is slowly breaking down and releasing it's chemical time bomb into the sea.
If you dive in the Med' or even snorkel, it's great fun to see crabs and octopi? living in the remains of Coke cans.
Back in the '70s I had a mate who was a maintenance diver on North Sea rigs, he was trained for the hard suits for working on the bottom, I asked him once what the sea bed looked like down there, his response was ' Mostly McDonalds containers and crisp packets with a fair sprinkling of plastic cups'. Not much seaweed or fish the trawlers had taken care of that.
So I don't think a bucket of bacteria are going to cut it.
I don't know how to drastically reduce plastic packaging because there is big money in it for the manufacturers and the oil companies who supply a lot of the basic materials for plastics, to reduce plastics you have to hit them in the pocket.
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