A BREATH OF FRESH AIR SAY CHEESE WAR ON ... - GEA Group

e all know – or suspect – that the scale of
waste in our societies is enormous and
not sustainable. Yet the fact of waste is
not new.
People have thrown things away for as long
as there have been people. Middens – the
ancient equivalent of landfill sites – are
found everywhere that mankind has ever
lived, and archaeologists treat them as
treasure troves with their broken remains
of all kinds of human activity.
Waste occurs in all communities, even
the most remote. But the combination of
urbanization and industrialization has made
this issue more pressing. More people create
more waste – so there is more to be dealt
with. Increased numbers of city dwellers
need livelihoods. And industries need
materials to work with.
In the early 19th century, London was by far
the largest city in the world, and thus first to
face such urban issues. In the King’s Cross
area, where a glamorous new high-speed
railway terminal now connects London
with Paris and Brussels, there was once
a mountain of waste: horse bones, broken
glass, rags, rotting vegetables and above all
‘dust’. Immense mounds of cinders and ash
from millions of coal fires.
Sites such as this were not only the workplace
of so-called ‘scavengers’, but also a source of
wealth for their owners. The Great Dust Heap
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of King’s Cross was sold to Russia in 1848 for
EUR 49,000, to make bricks for the rebuilding
of Moscow after the Napoleonic wars.
At today’s values, that is more than EUR 3.6
million, and this sale is an early example of
two universal truths. Where there’s muck
there’s money; and one man’s waste can be
another’s raw material. Today, equivalent
sites are a source of livelihood in hundreds
of cities in the developing world.
rich pickings
While there is little reliable data for the
numbers of waste pickers globally, the World
Bank estimated (in 1988) that between one
and two per cent of the world’s population
subsists by waste picking. A 2010 study
estimated that there are 1.5 million waste
pickers in India alone; and Brazil, which
collects official statistics on waste pickers,
estimates that nearly a quarter of a million
of its citizens engage in waste picking.
In fact, Rio de Janeiro is home to what has
been described as the world’s biggest landfill
site – Jardim Gramacho. Waste pickers there
even have their own ‘trade union’ and can
make twice the minimum wage salvaging
cans, bottles, plastics and paper. The site was
due to close in May 2012 and be turned into a
park – like New York’s former mega-dump, the
worringly named Fresh Kills, which was once
the largest man-made structure on earth.
But far and away the largest waste site in the
world is the so-called Great Pacific Garbage
Patch. Ocean currents collect waste – mainly
plastic – from all over the world, and between
Hawaii and California there is a floating sea
of debris that is twice the size of Texas.
The scale of waste today is astonishing. In
2008 (the latest year for which figures are
available) the countries of the European
Union generated more than 2.6 billion tonnes
of waste. This means 5.2 tonnes per person.
The majority of this is waste that most people
wouldn’t know they were creating – such as
from construction and demolition work,
and from mining.
Nonetheless, domestic waste in the EU in
2008 totaled over 220 million tonnes – or
almost 440 kilograms per person. Almost
half of this waste mountain is sent to landfill.
Of the remainder, a considerable amount is
recovered and most of the rest is burnt.
recycling drive
The EU has been active in issuing directives
that have created obligations on member
countries to recycle or recover increasing
percentages of waste, and at the same time
discouraging landfilling. As a result, the
amount of recyclables sorted and placed on
the market increased by 15 per cent between
2004 and 2009.
Although the economic benefits of recycling
are less well known than the environmental
gains, they are considerable. While precise
statistics on the numbers of people employed
in recycling in the EU are not available, a
recent European Environment Agency (EEA)
report suggests that the figure is around
300,000 – and that it increased by 45 per
cent between 2000 and 2007. The same
report found that more jobs at higher income
levels are created by recycling compared to
landfilling or incinerating waste.
Furthermore, revenues from recycling are
substantial and are growing fast. From
2004 to 2008, for example, the turnover of
the seven main categories of recyclables
(glass; paper and card; plastic; iron and
steel; copper, aluminum and nickel; precious
metals; other metals) almost doubled across
the EU to more than EUR 60 billion.
This growth is in part being driven by demand for
raw materials in the booming Asian economies.
But for some categories of material, demand
within the EU itself will so far outstrip supply
that recycling will be the only way to maintain
growth in a number of critical industries
such as information technology and certain
renewable energy systems.