Post-holiday bins a metaphor for disposable society

The article below, written by Gerard Howlin, appeared in The Irish Times yesterday.

What is out of sight is out of mind. The debris of our pagan festival has been taken away. Excess has been sanitised and houses emptied of the carcasses and packaging we consumed and then discarded. 

Domestic order is restored, but the consequences of what we have done if just out of sight remains nearby. 

The fuller impact is global, accumulating and permanent.

Christmas is a metaphor for a disposable society. It’s a bumper crop of oblivion. It is also seamless continuity of how we live now. We are a single-use society. The disposable cup that hosts our coffee culture is a flagship for discordance between an imagined latte lifestyle and the unspeakable squalor it is anchored to.

In 2018 we threw out about 200 million cups. Fast fashion that depends on cheap sweat, globalised supply lines and packaging to boot can’t withstand us sweating inside it. It is allergic to washing, and must be quickly replaced. Our sophisticated gizmos from the humble kettle to the cinema screen-sized television are immune to repair. They are purposely designed for throwaway.

There is something called a linear economy and then there is a circular economy. We are world leaders in linear. It is not that our per capita outputs of waste are world-beating. It is that we have perfected a lifestyle that maximises our capacity to party, minimises our personal exposure to the consequences and has just enough of the balm of action to allow us have a very good time and feel good about ourselves at the same time. It is psychologically a sweet spot, and explains how after good progress on recycling over several years we have plateaued since.

The progress achieved means the low-hanging fruit is eaten. We are down from over 100 licensed landfill sites to just two. Waste segregation at home is both an essential thing and a false panacea. It leads to a sense that we have done our thing.

Waste recycling

In fact municipal waste recycling has increased by 11 per cent since 2016, but total waste generated also increased by 11 per cent, so the recycling rate has stagnated at 41 per cent. On a personal level we are doing a little better on how we deal with our consumer effluent but all the while we are creating ever more of it. We have hardly started on the circular economy.

Recycling is only the beginning. Reuse and reduction are the bigger challenges we have hardly addressed. This is where popular culture and personal choice meet global warming. The linear economy requires continuing exploitation, manufacture, transport and packaging of new raw materials globally to supply insatiable need. 

Consumption is the prelude to disposal. There is only an instant between peak presentation and packaging before use disintegrates what had been must-have into takeaway.

On Sunday it was reported that England will follow Scotland and Wales and ban single-use items such as plastic cutlery, plates and trays. The simple plastic fork has a 200-year lifespan.

There are other simple choices to hand. The maligned Brussels sprout was provided by nature with its own packaging. So was the banana, the apple and orange. Environmental awareness goes when we go shopping. Why do potatoes need plastic packaging?

Design stage

The bigger issue is design. Most waste is built in at design stage.

That’s where EU and national legislation comes in. The humble cotton bud is no longer stuck on a plastic stick. Legislation forced design change. Circular economy legislation here since last summer and pending EU legislation will significantly extend powers over design. The Government can now ban stuff and will begin to do so. 

The disposable vape must be a particularly vile example of avoidable waste.

A key pressure on design is extended consumer responsibility (ECR). That makes manufacturers responsible for the afterlife of their products and incentivises waste-reduction and designs out what is unnecessary or can’t be reused. 

That is important because 80 per cent of environmental impacts are baked in at design stage. There has been a change in fashion about where responsibility lies. The emphasis on personal responsibility has switched to industry. That has certainly been a convenient cop-out for national politicians, who belly ache about climate levies and charges. It supposedly champions so called ordinary people but in reality it infantilises them.

It is our desire to spend more time with our stuff that is driving consumption up. We segregate waste to feel good, but actually we do it badly. Our bin contamination rates are appalling. Barely 2 per cent of our stuff comes from material that is recycled or recovered. 

All else comes from the exploitation of new primary raw material globally.