The environmental cost of wasting food

The amount of food that is wasted each year in the developed world is massive. We waste food in two ways; sometimes by over eating, which is not only a waste of food but a waste of our precious health, and by throwing away food that we have bought but do not wish to eat, either because we do not like it any more or because we suspect it has become stale.

Waste and recycling centres and issues at Witely

Landfill sites cause big environmental problems. No one wants to live next door to what is in effect a dumping ground for other people’s rubbish. There are so problems for a developed densely populated country like the United Kingdom if all they can do with copious amounts of rubbish is to dig a hole in the ground and bury it. Out of sight is not out of mind or out of hearing or out of smelling distance or out of environmental harm’s way. It is no more than sweeping the dust under the carpet.

Does anyone want 1400 tonnes of toxic rubbish?

Sometimes the reporting media of the United Kingdom puts an unconscious spin on a news event which attempts to make the best of a bad job. One example is “the UK is working with Brazilian authorities to return more than 1,400 tonnes of toxic waste to Britain”. This was a quotation by an official employed by the Environment Agency about some ninety containers full of all kinds of rubbish that householders in some parts of the United Kingdom had carefully segregated and separated as required by their municipal authorities in the belief that it would be recycled and rendered harmless.

The world’s population increases and climate change

In twenty one years’ time the population of the world is expected to be 8.3 billion souls. If it reaches that figure then there are very good grounds for believing that we will not have enough of the basic necessities of food -water and energy to support so many people.

Using methane from land fill sites

We waste our waste. We carefully follow our legal obligations and separate paper, metals, plastic and the like, urged on by an expensive television campaign telling us to make sure that our waste bins are skinny, with only things in then that are recyclable, and despite all this effort on our part, every little of our waste is recycled; it used to mostly go to landfills all over the country. Now some of it goes to landfills in China. All the carefully and time consumingly sorted waste is mostly stored in vast warehouses because the recycling centres have found that the price of raw materials has fall, making many of their business unviable, in the financial sense, although still very viable in the environmental sense of the word.

When waste goes into landfills it has many undesirable effects. If you look at what the residents at Small Dole have had to suffer as a result of their proximity to a landfill site, you will gain some insight. You can see from the local action group’s web site (http://www.smalldole.com/ )and unfortunately there are many communities who have suffered from the same problems caused by landfill sites.

Poisoning the Niger Delta and Shell’s Corporate Responsibilty

While millions of people in the Balkans and Eastern Europe have to cope in the bitter cold of a European winter without being able to burn natural gas for fuel gas, due to a dispute between Russia and the Ukraine, natural gas is being wasted thousands of miles away in Africa in the Niger Delta. Just as the cold weather is causing hardship and exacerbating ill health in Eastern Europe, so the wasteful burning of natural gas in Nigeria is damaging the health of many Nigerians.

We waste our waste

We waste so much and so much of our waste is wasted. A large city, like London, creates massive amounts of waste each day. Much of it is simply thrown into landfill sites. In London’s landfill sites we do not have people climbing over them scouring them for useful bits and pieces that the rich folk have thrown away, as happens in many cities around the world. No, we mainly waste our waste, mainly, by burying it underground and letting it rot there.