There’s no let up in our littering

ENOUGH people to fill Croke Park five times over will take to the highways and byways during April, picking up rubbish recklessly and shamelessly thrown to the four winds.

More than 400,000 volunteers will take part in National Spring Clean, Ireland’s largest anti-litter campaign, which shows civic spirit is still very much alive. Unfortunately, the fact they must do this work, year after year, also shows that a sizeable number of others just don’t care and continue littering.

Organised by An Taisce and funded by the Environment Department, the campaign runs throughout April and has been making Ireland a cleaner place since 1998.

Participation rates have been increasing yearly but so has the volume of rubbish. The amount of waste collected in 2007 was five times higher than in 1998 — proof the littering scourge isn’t going away.

However, some things are changing, notably in relation to recycling. When the national clean-up campaign began in 1998, none of the collected materials were recycled; now, 35% of them are.

As well as littering streets, roadways and railway lines, people still dump in bogs, remote rural areas, beaches, sand dunes and in well-known beauty spots, such as Killarney National Park and the Wicklow hills.

The culprits are now making huge efforts to avoid prosecution and embarrassing court appearances. Council officials who have the distasteful job of going through illegally dumped materials no longer find obvious clues, such as envelopes containing names and addresses. Indeed, culprits go to great pains to ensure they leave no evidence that could lead to their identity being established.

Unless offenders are caught red-handed, a prosecution is almost impossible to obtain. Therefore, the onus falls on the public to report people they see littering, or illegally dumping.

The amount of waste we produce, including packaging, is also growing. According to Repak, the annual Easter egg/chocolate splurge (6.4 million eggs) resulted in a mammoth 624 tonnes of additional used packaging, equal to the weight of 78 whales.

If the egg boxes were laid out side by side, they would cover the Croke Park pitch seven times over. Overall, the Easter festivities generated over 42,000 tonnes of used packaging. Recyling offers a solution, says Repak’s Darrell Crowe.

Few would argue against the assertion that waste management is, perhaps, the most emotive environmental topic in Ireland today. Many dumps are reaching capacity and local authorities are desperately seeking solutions to the waste disposal problem.

Nobody wants to live alongside the new ‘super landfills’ being earmarked for various locations. Neither do people want alternatives to landfills in their communities, as is evident by strident objections to recycling and transfer centres. It’s the same story with incinerators. All of which begs the question: what do we do with the waste society generates? Alternatives to landfilling include gasification, which includes the generation of heat and electricity from waste. Combined with recycling and composting, this process offers a solution which can result in highly reduced landfill volumes.

Environmental consultant Michelle Hallahan, who looks at the whole waste issue from a broad perspective, focuses on how Mother Nature deals with the matter. Nature, which has been designing its own ‘waste disposal’ solutions for millions of years — compared to our paltry 100 years, or so — has no such thing as waste.

“Consider the tree outside your window: it ‘disposes’ of its leaves in the autumn,” says Hallahan. “In the human world, this would be considered waste and would be raked up and bagged to go to a landfill. Not so with nature. The soil welcomes its once-yearly feeding each autumn and sets to, breaking down the leaves to nourish itself.”

She believes this principle needs to be applied to all processes throughout industry, agriculture and the home, adding that most packaging, which makes up about 50% of the solid waste stream, should be composed of organic material.

“In this way, a discarded wrapper would not become litter on the street; it would compost to become soil,” she writes on the Sustainable Energy (SEI) website.

“There is no need for shampoo bottles, drinks containers and equipment packaging to last centuries longer than their contents. Industry needs to address the issue of lifecycle in all their products.” Hallahan refers to the example of Xerox Corporation, which developed the first 95% recyclable/reusable photocopier. The machine was developed to be long-lasting and highly reparable.

At the end of its lifecycle, it is collected by Xerox and returned to the factory where it is dismantled into component parts and rebuilt into another machine, which can be resold as a new product.

* To register for National Spring Clean 2008, contact the campaign hotline on 01-4002220, or log on to the website at www.nationalspringclean.org.