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Recycling, by now, should be part of intuitive repertoire. We all know how important it is for the future of our planet and the next generation. There are parts of our lives that have genuinely altered due our change in attitude towards our own rubbish. We now have a system in place (though sometimes overly complicated and confusing) where every household has the ability to recycle their waste. The numbers in relation to the amount of waste we recycle are looking positive. From 1991-1992 the average person in the UK produced 428kg of waste a year, shockingly only 11kg of that was recycled. The stats are a little different from recent years, although the average amount of waste produced rose to 466kg per person, the amount recycled jumped massively to 185kg. Yes we’ve come on leaps and bounds from a decade ago where few of us knew what climate change was and even fewer of us realized that in fact we could reuse and recycle half of the stuff we shoveled into black bags and turfed outside, but we need to be doing more. The danger to our world is still as great as it ever has been. What’s needed now is new technology to come and take the strain off of households who do all they can and more to try and keep their carbon footprint to a bare minimum, and turn the heat up on industry to, first of all, invest in technology and research to make making our lives greener easier and second of all, to name and shame wasteful companies and praise those who do all they can to recycle, reuse and stay green. These technologies are in the works, offshore wind farms and solar panel farms are becoming more widespread across the world. The success of the Toyota Prius is turning people’s awareness on to hybrid or electronic cars but there is still more to be done. A British think-tank, Carbon Tracker has calculated that in order for us to keep our atmosphere safe we must keep greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere under 450 parts per million (ppm). As it stands we are currently broaching 392 ppm and it’s not slowing down. In order for us to keep within the 450ppm limit it means the world can only emit another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. However, the real sting in the tail of these facts (as if you needed one already) is that there is estimated 2,795 gigatonnes of energy from fossil fuels left in the ground. It is obvious that we can’t continue to carry on the way we’re going, we need to stop drilling and get our heads together to come up an alternative to our dependence on natural gas and oil. We can take some comfort in the changes we’ve made to our everyday lives but we need the people in charge, the politicians, and environmental envoys from across the globe and scientists to knock their head together, drop the political wishy-washiess and sort this out before it all becomes too late. There has been some success, take the process of energy from waste plant for example. By investing in the latest technology Rabbit group have been able to generate 100% green electricity from household and industrial waste and minimizing the use of landfills in the UK. All the waste collected is put through a process of sorting to remove any recyclable material. Building materials which can be reused such as bricks, sand and soil are repackaged and sent to other plants to be refined while plastics are boiled before going to specialist packaging companies which reuse the plastics and metals are sent direct to merchants. The remaining waste is screened to ensure there are no more reusable materials before being burned. This process isn’t as simple as it sounds, and simply saying that the remaining leftovers from the recycling process are burned doesn’t really give justice to the process. The whole process is fully automated and closely monitored so that the steam produced from this processes is used to power turbines which generate 5 megawatts of totally green electricity. Although we still have a lot to do in order for us to make our planet greener, safer and cleaner for future generations to enjoy we are on our way. We now have to negotiate the difficult process of weaning ourselves off oil, as a planet we are addicted. The hangover will be painful and expensive but necessary in order for our species to survive.
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