TV & Radio

We really have no idea what happens to our domestic waste

‘The Truth About Your Rubbish’ lifted the bin lid on domestic waste disposal in Britain

Does your waste bin contain items that could be recycled? Course it does

Wed Mar 10 2021 - 05:59

A moment of crushing relatability arrives halfway through The Truth About Your Rubbish: Dispatches (Channel 4, Monday) as a family from London share the contents of their recycling bin.

Greta Thunberg would not approve of what lies within, it feels safe to say. Plastic and cloth are mixed with glass and cardboard. The waste bin meanwhile contains items that could easily be recycled. We can all share in their shame.

Not that it’s really their fault, this brisk and thought-provoking documentary is quick to point out. The labelling around recycling is bamboozling – and then there is the question of how much of our household rubbish is recycled anyway.

The depressing truth, journalist and presenter Lucy Siegle reveals, is that lots of it is burned in incinerators. Or at least that is the case in the UK where some councils recycle less than 25 per cent of the waste householders put out in their bins.

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“What they’re burning here are valuable resources that should remain in the economy, be recycled, be reused – and not be burned,” says Georgia Elliott-Smith, an environmental engineer campaigning against the construction of a new incinerator in North London. “There’s no penalty for failing to meet a recycling target.”

The reasons for this are at once convoluted - your eyes will glaze over at mention of public private partnerships - and also straightforward. In the UK, tax breaks make it profitable to use waste - recyclable or not - to power incinerators. And so more and more waste ends up being burned rather than disposed of in other ways.

“There are a lot of people that are highly incentivised to incinerate waste,” says Professor Ian Boyd, a former advisor to the UK department of the environment. “Because of the investments we make in waste power plants we end up a lot of the time creating a market for waste and therefore trying to generate more waste in order to generate the income for the power plants we have made such large investments in.”

The issue, Siegle elaborates, is that incinerators are not as environmentally friendly as we are led believe. In the UK, for instance, they generate more raw tonnage of CO2 emissions than coal-fired power stations.

“Waste incineration is not a green source of energy,” says environmental lawyer Tatiana Luján. “Because plastic is fossil fuel in solid form, the amount of carbon that is released when incinerating that waste is going to increase massively.”

Britain has a march on Ireland with this technology. There are 90 municipal waste incinerators in the UK while just two operate in Ireland according to the EPA website. So their problems aren’t quite our problems yet.

And yet one key aspect of Siegle’s argument will nonetheless cut through: that we really have no idea what happens to our domestic waste once we bung it in the bin and slam the lid.