Katie Bice: Recycling properly is never a waste of our time
When China stopped taking our waste because it was too contaminated, it barely caused a ripple but now it’s piled high in factories around Melbourne. The problem is clearly down to a general ignorance about what actually happens to our rubbish, writes Katie Bice.
Opinion
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We are incredibly naive about our waste. Everyone throws it in the rubbish or in the recycling bin and thinks nothing more of it until bin night. Then we casually roll it out to the kerbside and like magic it disappears from our lives.
When China stopped taking our waste because it was too contaminated, it barely caused a ripple. We just went about things as normal. That was until about a month ago when the state’s biggest recycler stopped accepting any more waste and then went into the hands of liquidators.
Our eyes have now been opened to exactly what happens to all the stuff we chuck out. It’s piled high in factories dotted all across Melbourne.
It’s stacked in about 700 shipping containers waiting at docks for a ship that isn’t coming.
Some of what’s in the stockpiles of milk bottles, newspapers and plastic containers is three years old.
Surely I’m not alone in admitting it had never occurred to me before now that our recyclable waste was shipped overseas.
It was never part of the reduce, reuse, recycle slogan that it all ended up in China. I had stupidly assumed it was all being sorted and turned into other things here.
I’m no worm farm, composting, zero waste hippie. In fact when my kids’ school banned plastic wrap for one day a week, I was heard grumbling that it was my least favourite day of the week. But this waste crisis has revealed how much garbage we carelessly discard and expect others to handle.
Our attempts to do the right thing begin and end with throwing things in either the rubbish or recycling. And let’s be honest, most of us don’t even know what we can put in which bins.
We just hope someone will sort it out for us.
Our councils, recycling companies and governments all need to do a better job and supermarkets and food outlets should get rid of unnecessary plastic.
When I was on a Qantas flight recently it was pleasing to see them working at waste reduction, including getting rid of plastic cutlery and turning to paper and cardboard packaging alternatives.
But householders should use this as an opportunity to step back and consider different ways to do things. We should educate ourselves better on what can be recycled so we aren’t contributing to the contamination.
I’ll even try, on some days, to not use enough sandwich bags to clog a small waterway when I pack the kids’ lunches.
Katy Bice is the Sunday Herald Sun deputy editor
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