Recycling and waste in public: the British government’s solution to water pollution
It’s a question with quite literally sweeping implications for Britain’s efforts to combat water pollution and keep streets and waters safe, not to mention conservation. So it’s a bit of a shock when you read an email address to a letter detailing how to recycle old fish boxes instead of picking rubbish up from public streets to speed up collection time.
It’s not a document sent out to England’s 128,000 pubs, unsurprisingly. It’s a government document addressed to England’s 13 million food and drink outlets – including all supermarkets, but it’s ordering individual businesses to recycle old fish boxes instead of picking rubbish up from public streets to speed up collection time.
While that’s largely a plant to help with city-wide waste collection, the practice also makes sense if you consider how much fish boxes cover the ground – some one million are already being used on average to help catch fish from the streets or storm drains, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Even worse, the offer – part of the 2012 EU-wide directive on Food Waste – suggests that businesses give up space in their bins for recycled fish boxes. So waste collected from the street will now be sent to waste hot spots for recycling and waste created from a recycling plant will go to landfill.
If that all doesn’t have you cringing on the inside, you’re not alone. Pro-environment lobbying group ClientEarth has more than 30 million examples of businesses cowering under government pressure from environmental enforcement, exposing the kind of draconian tactics the government is using to force companies to stop accepting bottle deposits and cooperate with litter-picking by throwing food waste in the back of the truck.
The campaign shows how everyday types of waste matter as much as highly-bandwidth data. So stop trading in your hands for fish and bin them!
Quick tip: every time you dump food waste into the back of a truck, don’t forget to flush the whole thing away.
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