Green myth - recycled waste is dumped in landfill
Posted by DavidM in Reduce, re-use, recycle | 9 June 2008
A common excuse I get from people who can't be bothered to recycle is that there's no point - waste collected for recycling is dumped in landfills or burned, not recycled.
I've seen the headlines that give this impression so I thought I'd do a little digging. A simple search on Google answered the question fairly quickly.
A Telegraph article from March this year states that at least 240,000 tons of material meant to be recycled was actually dumped or burned. Given poor reporting by local councils the true figure could be double this.
With this information it's easy to see why people may feel sorting their household rubbish for recycling is a waste of time.
However, it's only at the end of the article that they mention this 240,000 tons only represents 1.6% of all the recycling material collected, so even at double this level it accounts for no more than 3.2%. That certainly doesn't sound like 'most' recycling being dumped and shows it is worth making the effort.
I also came across a Times article on the same issue from last year. This explored the reasons why the material was dumped rather than recycled. When councils collect mixed material rather than segregated, the plants that sort it don't always perform well, leaving the recycling plants with unusable material that then has to be dumped or burned.
To fix this, householders need to sort their waste as accurately as possible, councils need to be held more accountable for the quality fo their waste and where it eventually ends up and investment is needed to improve the sorting facilities.
Even so, the myth is debunked - a small proportion of recyclable waste is dumped but the more effort we put in at the point of disposal, the more can be recycled.
