Our refuse mountain is growing - Let’s wake up on waste tsunami

THERE are barely three weeks left before Christmas reaches a climax. The idea that our great midwinter festival is confined to just a few days drowned in a tsunami of consumerism many years ago. One of the collateral consequences of our rapacious buying — even if it may be a bah-humbug one — is an ever-growing mountain of packaging waste.

A recent Repak report suggested imported packaging waste from online shopping has passed the 7,000 tonnes a year mark, and that this figure will grow by around one third every year. Startling as those figures are, they are only a fraction of the packaging waste generated and all of it has to be dealt with one way or another, at home or abroad. The coming weeks will show a sharp climb in the waste graph, so maybe we should be more circumspect about what we buy and be more conscious of the packaging waste, especially in food products, involved.