Christmas waste mountain

Donal Hickey on our annual binge and its cleanup

CHRISTMAS shopping is well underway and the annual waste mountain is already starting to rise. It’s the time when most waste is generated and, unsurprisingly, the demon drink sits at the very summit of the mountain, with cans and bottles all over the place.

Without exaggeration, it can be truly said that rubbish of every kind generated at Christmas is staggering. With over-indulgence the order of the day, waste bins expand along with waistlines.

This festive season, people all around the country will munch their way through an estimated 8.5 million mince pies, 1.4m tins of biscuits, a million selection boxes and will pull a whopping 16m Christmas crackers.

Even a cursory glance at traffic from off-licenses, with processions of trolleys full of booze heading toward car boots, shows that the country is preparing for the mother and father of all binges. Millions of bottles of wine and millions of cans of beer will be quaffed, merrily.

People aren’t going to see themselves short of anything, including drinks, at this time of year. It is estimated that the increased consumer activity at Christmas generates an additional 80,000 tonnes of packaging waste, or 170 million used packaging containers.

This is equal to: 20 million wine bottles; 48m aluminium beer cans; 35m soft drinks cans; 13m beer bottles; 45m plastic drinks bottles; 2.5m spirit bottles; 4m cardboard sweet boxes; 2.5m cardboard toy boxes and 4m rolls of wrapping paper.

Repak, responsible for recycling packaging nationally, wants shoppers to use recycling centres and bottle banks as they look toward an even greener Green Christmas in 2007.

A Repak spokesman appealed to people not to throw paper from crackers and other packaging into the fire. “By burning all this stuff, people would only contribute to carbon emissions and that’s something we certainly don’t want to see,” she said.

Throughout the year, we are producing over twice as much household and commercial waste as we did 10 years ago. Waste generation has been increasing in tandem with our increasing consumption of goods and services which, of course, explodes during Christmas.

The advice to use less packaging seems to be ignored at Christmas, with manufacturers and retailers insisting on using a huge amount of wrapping on presents and all kinds of products.

However, virtually all raw materials used and all products produced will sooner or later become waste which needs to be recycling or dumped in the old-fashioned way.

In Ireland, the packaging waste recovery rate was 60% in 2005. This exceeds the EU 2005 recovery target of 50% and achieves the 2011 target of 60%. Also, there are more than 2,000 bring banks in operation, collecting close to 90,000m tonnes of waste. Eighty-one civic amenity sites collected 104,267 tonnes of waste in 2005.

It’s probably safe to assume that Christmas Day must be the peak day for accumulation of packaging waste in Ireland, after all those colourfully-wrapped presents have been opened and paper and boxes discarded.

You’ll see the evidence in most houses and the next question is how to get rid of it all. Repak is offering the following guidelines (see panel) to make it easier for people get rid of their trash in an organised and environmentally friendly sort of way over the 12 green days of Christmas.