Zero waste – how close could we get in Bridport?

Anne Rickard

Ian Robins gave a talk at Bridport Town Hall about zero waste at the end of 2008.   It was an impressive talk and gave thought to how we could reduce our waste.

We have lived in a throw-away society for a very long time.

How can we start to take responsibility for it ourselves?

Can we reduce our landfill waste by not bringing the stuff into our lives in the first place?

Can we think about how we are going to dispose of stuff before we acquire it?  

Can we get together with our neighbours and make an effort to reduce our waste?

Getting rid of stuff has been far too easy for decades.   Everything has been so easy to acquire - we can change our colour schemes, our clothes, our cars, for the merest of reasons, not always because they are worn out, but rather because the fashion has changed.

Not acquiring in the first place is an easy step to reducing waste.

As he so rightly pointed out, we ‘throw things away’, so they are out of sight, but there is no ‘away’.    We can’t send it into space.   Whatever isn’t reused or recycled is still here with us, dumped into landfill, where, depending on what it is, it may take millennia to decompose, and may be creating toxic gases underground all the while.

Taking the idea to a probably illogical conclusion, what if we could (conveniently) send stuff into space and get rid of it that way – would we plunder every material we can find and zoom it off somewhere when we’re tired of it, leaving us an empty shell of a planet?   How mad that would be.

A lot of the materials which end up in landfill use an enormous amount of energy to firstly extract and secondly process to make into whatever it is they are destined to be made into – energy which is not recoverable.    Not only that, much of it has an extremely short useful life – plastic bags are a prime example.

In addition, these materials are limited and should be considered precious – so why do we bury them underground and in a form which would be virtually impossible to recover?

It’s so easy.   We have become used to someone else taking responsibility for our waste.   Black sacks are filled until they are bulging and the District Council obligingly take them away for us.   Even some of the materials we recycle are conveniently collected for us and who knows where they actually go and what happens to them?

Now then - what if there were no rubbish collections?   Would we be prepared to be surrounded by our waste?   I don’t think so.   It wouldn’t be long before we made sure we didn’t collect stuff we couldn’t re-use or recycle in the first place.

So, can we take responsibility ourselves for reducing or even eliminating the need for landfill?   A bit of thinking before we purchase/acquire is what’s required.   If we reject stuff that cannot be reused or recycled, then there will be no need for anything to go to landfill.  

Job done!   Zero waste!