Prices for recyclables have dropped and warehouses all over the planet are just filling with recyclable materials.
Steve Eminton, of http://letsrecycle.com “said that mountains of plastic bottles, paper and steel cans were likely to build up by the end of the year and that the problem would be exacerbated by the Christmas festivities, when a surge of packaging materials and drinks containers would fill recycling bins.”
Yet another reason to make prezzies or Buy Handmade http://www.buyhandmade.org/
I saw the video below on the Shiny and Fuzzy blog, an idyllic view of recyclables sorting.
Just in case you ever wondered… this is NOT how recycling is sorted in Ireland. A friend of mine who lectures at IT Sligo on Environmental Science saw first hand that much of the recyclable material we “sort” actually gets all bunged together anyway! He also explained how it was hand-sorted, which was laborious and costly, and much of it simply gets shipped off & they pay to be processed elsewhere. Up in Donegal, my sister explained that the Bring Centre she used to go to in Carndonagh is closed… there’s simply not the infrastructure to manage all this recycled material in Ireland.
Basically, one answer is simply not to buy as much this Christmas, refuse to purchase heavily packaged goods, and tell the supermarket, toystore, whatever to stuff it.
