Victoria's Green Matters - 5th January 2011

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

It was good to read in the Mercury that we are now recycling more rubbish since the introduction of the new bins. Figures for October 2011 showed a recycling rate of 45% as compared with 36% for the same month in 2010 and this was before all households had received their bins.

There has been much criticism of the scheme, made obvious by the letters page in the Mercury, but as people have had time to get used to the new ideas, it seems as if the system has been accepted and is working well.

We still have a long way to go to do as well as the Japanese who recycle as much as 77% of their plastic waste. This rate has been encouraged by the government passing several laws to address the problems of waste disposal in a country that is running out of space for landfill, as is the UK. Japan has been separating out its plastic waste since 1997 and recycling it or burning it to convert it to useful chemicals or to generate energy.

It is thought that there is 265 million tonnes of plastic produced in the world each year and two thirds of this huge amount is used in packaging. As we know, much of this packaging is totally unnecessary and while we can now recycle so much more of our waste, we must still try to avoid over-packaged goods in the first place.