Recycling - We No Longer Just Landfill Our Rubbish

It's not so very long ago that once you'd finished using an item you'd bought, you chucked it in the bin (singular) and it got buried in a huge hole in the ground somewhere. Plastics, glass, batteries, food waste, oil cans, paper - the lot. A refined resource, used for the briefest of time, and then buried in landfill to decompose forever more.

Nowadays it seems unthinkable for most of us to not recycle our waste packaging. If you're stuck in a place without recycling bins with an empty can or bottle it feels uncomfortable to just bin it with everything else. If you have a type of plastic packaging which the local council won't accept in their collections it just feels weird not adding it to one of your recycling boxes. And all this is a surprisingly recent phenomenon in the UK.

As recently as the mid 1990s that most areas of the UK had no real recycling schemes in place. Only conscientious folks with enough time on their hands took their bottles and cans to bottle banks, there were no home collections. Even the traditional bottled milk collection and bottle return system was on the wane, and the pop bottle coin deposit schemes of the 50's and 60's had all but died out. Visitors from more enlightened European countries reported feeling the same un-comfortableness binning bottles and cans as we do today.

But all that began to change by the turn of the millennium, and now recycling rates in England have jumped from 11% to 42%:

Source: Insomnia.co.uk

Waste products like plastics and cans are both increasingly recycled where once they were just buried:

Source: Recoup.org

Source: Sustain-ed.org

But there's still a long way to go to eradicate the remaining landfill waste which cannot be recycled. One suggestion is that there should be more Energy From Waste (EFW) incineration plants in the UK like in many other countries, which would put much of the remaining 75% of un-recycled waste to good use, rather than being left to decompose into its constituent waste gasses in an ugly hole in the ground:

Source: Arc21.org.uk

That way the UK could incinerate about 50% of its waste to generate energy, recycle most of the rest and only landfill a tiny remainder, just like in countries like Denmark and Sweden.