Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2006 2:22 pm Post subject: What happens to our waste?
Watching a driver unload glass from those recepticals for different coloured glass in a supermarket car park recently set me thinking, why is all that carefully sorted glass going into the back of that lorry all apparently into the same hole?
Talking to others has revealed that we are sending our waste to China, councils are paying, the chinese are employing children to burn electrical goods with hand held LPG burners separating the brass, copper and vapourising the plastic straight into atmosphere, no masks.
So if you have ever wondered what they do with your old mobile phone?
A TV program showed lorry drivers emptying their loads of carefully sorted glass straight into the tip. "No money for reclamation" said the driver. Is this true?
Mr Steiner said he had just learned that at least 100,000 computers a month were entering the Nigerian port of Lagos.
"If these were good quality, second hand pieces of equipment this would perhaps be a positive trade of importance for development.
"But local experts estimate that between a quarter to 75% of these items including old TVs, CPUs and phones are defunct - in other words e-waste, in other words long distance dumping from developed country consumers and companies to an African rubbish tip or landfill."
"I would say that Britain is dumping its rubbish in the name of recycling. It is not responsible recycling that is being done. It is reprocessing, but the methods being used are still mostly rudimentary. There are some good factories, but on the whole it is small scale, done in backstreets with little environmental standards. People are burning plastic, sorting it by hand, the water gets polluted and it goes back into the rivers," he said.
UK supermarket chains, some of the largest generators of plastic packaging waste in Britain, are all getting their recycling done in China, said a spokesman for Sainsbury's. "We send 5,000 tonnes of plastic there a year. We used to send it to a firm in Nottinghamshire, but it has closed down," he said. "We looked for others in Britain but no one could match the Chinese option for quantity or price. We would love to see it being recycled here, but it's not possible at present."
But Ian Bowles, a spokesman for Asda, said he did not know where the company's plastic recycling was being done. "
As these people make so much profit then surely they could set up their own recycling plants and send their stuff their. I'm sure all the big supermarket chains could get together and do it. Perhaps the goverment shoud legislate for this.
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