Refuse to make refuse

Why is Irish recycling outsourced to China?

I keep thinking about rubbish, about trash, junk, the stuff we discard, the mountains we throw away.

I thought about it on my latest trip to the bottle bank with a full car-boot – someone drank a lot of wine – and I think about it every time I wrap a sarmi in cling film so it doesn’t fall apart in a lunchbox, and I think about it as tins pile up in the sink, waiting to be rinsed and crushed for my recycling bin.

I thought about it bitterly when my son’s flat-pack desk was delivered sandwiched in noxious polystyrene, and I thought about it guiltily on Friday night when I bought prepped microwaveable veggies in a plastic pot for dinner, and ready-to-cook fish in a film-covered foil tray.

So much waste … But I thought about it most when a container ship filled with compressed recycling, bound for China, was sent back to Ireland recently, because when it reached Amsterdam the authorities realised something stank, literally.

They reckon it was rotting food left in takeaway boxes, and disposable nappies chucked into recycling by householders who don’t want to pay to have their trash taken away, because in Ireland recycling is collected free of charge, but not household waste.

This got me wondering, though, why Irish recycling is outsourced to China – although, to be fair, some is processed on the island itself, perhaps to encourage virtuousness in the good, green folk of the land.

But is it really worth all this rinsing and sorting and worry about what is recyclable, when my recyclables might well be clocking up so many shipping-miles that it’d conceivably be better to incinerate the lot and use the energy produced as a power source? And does it negate recycling efforts if I run water to rinse containers clean before putting them in recycling? Is a sheen of grease okay, the occasional pea even, or will it clog up the machinery at the recycling plant and cause the entire lot to go to landfill?

And then that landfill might be in China, with an ecologically-insane boat trip taking it there … I recycle because I think I’m doing good, but maybe it’s just a panacea for consumerism’s soul. From electronic graveyards in west Africa to vast plastic gyres in the oceans, ours is a throwaway society.

So I – we – must think before buying; we must refuse, not make refuse.