Keeping The Temperature Down While You’re Out Walking
“Look at me”, it seems to say, “I was put here by someone who doesn’t give a &%$?”
“If you think there’s a hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change”, it says, “you’re going to have to persuade people like the person who left me here”.
My anthropomophizing of litter sometimes goes in a different direction. The lament of the single-use cup, for example: “Someone spent care and energy creating me, but I held one cup of coffee up to one person’s mouth, and now I’m out of a job, and I’m on the streets…”
There are a lot of studies conducted around how behaviours influence climate change. It’s common to hear discussions regarding the limited impact that recycling can have on climate change mitigation. This is compounded by some dubious approaches to accounting for emissions from waste at the global level, and in corporate accounting (blog on this coming soon). There are interesting rankings regarding the relative merits of recycling, or of using an electric car, or eating no / less meat and dairy, or flying abroad (and today, that looks like fuelling a fire). At the heart of this discussion is a simple truth - everything we do has some form of impact. Each person is likely to find some behaviours more or less easy to adopt than others. Until the cultural (and technological) shift is such that the needle that measures happiness moves in direct opposition to the dial measuring global temperature, then we’ll all continue to engage in activities that vary in their destructive impact. A useful axiom, then, might be to ensure that whilst also reducing our impact where we can, and avoiding unnecessary impacts, wherever we’re likely to generate emissions, we maximise the benefit or enjoyment we derive from the activity: don’t blow your notional carbon budget for no good reason.
The activity of littering, though, is one which seems likely to bear only the most tenuous of links to happiness. Those who litter might take the view, “hey, the damage is done - I already consumed the item”. But that empty bottle or can embodies energy and emissions that any single-use item with even a modicum of self-esteem would wish to see conserved. “At worst, recycle me”, it might say. “Don’t, whatever you do, just chuck me on the ground, let alone, into the river or the sea”.
There’s no positive spin we can place on littering, and if the UK ever finally gets round to implementing a long-awaited hokey-cokey (Scotland’s got glass in, England’s got glass out, in, out, …) deposit refund scheme, I suspect there’ll be some for whom it’s still considered “kew-ull” to chuck (for example) Red Bull cans out of car windows (other drinks are available, but Red Bull is the stand out brand in countryside littering in my experience).
There’s a growing body of literature that highlights the negative value litter imposes on society. No one here in the UK really needs to do it. Where it does happen, then given the negative value experienced by society linked to its presence, we can, at least, convert another’s vice into some kind of virtue. If you’re reading this and you believe we’re confronting a climate emergency, then why would you leave litter on the floor? I don’t, for a moment, want to prolong other people’s vice purely to preserve the opportunity to signal virtue: people should not litter, and we should do what’s necessary to eliminate littering. I’m merely suggesting that those of us equipped with understanding and a social conscience can help right the wrong which is, for now, routinely done, not least as policy makers continue to fail us in dithering and inaction.
We pick the litter up.
But here’s the little twist to up the benefits from your action.
Don’t just put what you’ve picked up in ‘a litter bin’: if it can be recycled, make sure it finds its way to a container whose contents are likely to be recycled.
Let me explain - very briefly -why.
Plastics: great, you’ve picked the stuff up. Is it recyclable stuff (e.g. a plastic bottle)? If so, it can go in a recycling bin. If you put the same stuff in a ‘refuse’, or ‘litter’ bin, it’s likely to end up either in landfill or incineration. The (for the time being, overwhelmingly fossil-derived) carbon in the bottle will be sequestered (not released) in the landfill. But in an incineration facility, the plastic’s rather like oil, and it goes into the atmosphere immediately. In the UK, there’ll be some electricity generated (maybe some heat as well). That might avoid other sources of electricity and heat, but electricity generation in the UK emits far less CO2 per unit of energy than an incinerator, especially where the waste being burned is plastic. Burning plastic in UK incinerators is like burning oil in low efficiency power stations. If instead, you recycle the material, there’s an energy saving from recycling plastic (as opposed to making it from scratch using fossil fuels). If you live in a place that incinerates its leftover waste, like Bristol where I live, then for every gram of plastic you make sure is recycled rather than incinerated, you reduce CO2 emissions considerably. The scorecard (roughly) for each gram of plastic: landfill = 0; recycling = -2; incineration = +2. In other words, recycling instead of landfilling = a 4 gram reduction (i.e. saving) in CO2 per gram of plastic. That figure will change over time.
Aluminium: I’m going to assume it’s a can that you’ve picked up. Here, putting the can in the nearest litter bin has an impact that depends on whether the waste is destined for landfill or incineration. Incinerators do extract metals from the ash that remains after burning waste. They do this with varying levels of accuracy, but the resulting aluminium is less likely to find its way back into an aluminium can, and it might not attract the same value as a cleanly separated can - different uses of aluminium make use of different alloys, and there’s something to be said for keeping cans in ‘closed loop’ systems. Nonetheless, the overall environmental benefit from recycling might be smaller when the place the can might otherwise have gone is an incinerator. I’ve based the numbers below on landfill = 0; recycling = -10; incineration = -6.6.
Glass: gram for gram, the impacts are not so great, but it’s also heavier. It’s also worth noting that you might be preventing the glass form being smashed and causing further problems, either to cyclists, or pets, or livestock. With glass there’ll be no CO2 emissions when sent to a landfill, and in the case of glass being incinerated, it generally finds itself in ash, and not in a form that’s easy to extract for recycling ‘as glass’. It might be used in road surfacing, with limited CO2 benefit. Recycling, though, might give a saving of around 0.2 grams per gram recycled in UK (though that benefit might depend on how the glass is collected in the recycling system).
Some example calculations are below. It might be fun to do this with kids, and help them understand the significance of recycling, or of not wasting stuff.
From a morning walk around Clifton Observatory in Bristol….
And another here - I left the house with no plastic bags - I returned with three full ones….
… the three bags were littered.
The three I found were filled with this, plus some other bits of plastic….
I’ve lived and breathed these calculations for the past 25 years. If I’ve got limited capacity to pick stuff up, I find myself in a mental game of ‘how to prioritise what I pick up’. My basic rules are:
I always pick up usable plastic bags - they increase the amount I can collect (see the pictures above). I also pick up a fair few dog-poo bags which get used when my wife (who adores dogs) and I take other people’s dogs for a walk;
I always pick up aluminium cans and plastic bottles and I make sure they get to a recycling container (I don’t include supposedly segregated litter bins in that definition - have a look in them to see why);
I pick up as much other plastic, especially film, as I see. I mostly put these in refuse / litter bins because they (dirty, household packaging films) aren’t recycled where I live (yet) - the main benefit is avoiding their causing problems for wildlife, and preventing breakdown in the environment on the inexorable journey to becoming microplastics, and polluting soil, rivers, or seas;
I pick up glass bottles / jars (there are a smaller number of them than cans / plastic bottles, but they are there). Left out there, they’re prone to breakage, and can cause other problems (bike punctures, animal ‘feet’, can be used in fights). I always take them to a recycling container;
I pick up paper and cardboard - especially if dry, where it can still be valuable material for recycling. Perhaps the most negative impact is how it appears to other residents, and because it looks bad, it seems to send a message to others, “it’s OK to litter here - the place is already spoiled”. A growing amount of littered cardboard is packaging of single-use e-cigarettes (“vapes”);
I pick up disposable vapes - I won’t reveal here what I do with them as I don’t want to encourage others to do the same. How these ever came to market is a question that should be asked to help us to develop meaningful product policies;
I also find - pretty ridiculously - a growing amount of clothing, such as gloves, hats, scarves, t-shirts, a nod to how cheap clothing now is in real terms. Depending on where these are, these might come home with me where they get washed and either used, or taken to a second hand shop. I also have a couple of beanie-style hats, and a couple of t-shirts which I use when I’m cycling that are basically ‘found items’ - probably not “pre-loved”;
And last week, I picked up my first littered single-use ice pack. Yes, they do exist.
I’d be lying if I said I had the perfect algorithm to rank these priorities, but I have become used to understanding what I’m likely to confront, depending on where I am, and on the time of year, and the weather.
If you’re walking locally, get familiar with your local recycling services - you can usually find recycling containers in homes along the way as you walk so you can ‘place as you go’. No one’s ever given me a dirty look for doing this, and when a resident sees me using their recycling container, asking if it’s OK to put litter in their bin has never elicited anything other than a nod.
Talking of things dirty, at this point, there’s usually a health warning: “do be careful, reader, etc…” I’m not that careful. I mean, I don’t pick stuff up and then lick my fingers, but I don’t go out with gloves and a special picker. After all, I’m not picking up raw, unbagged dog faeces (though I do pick up bags containing it - the bag, after all, was ‘the hygiene bit’). I pick up litter every day - there’s never a day when there’s none there. There’s a ridiculous amount more when the weather’s been good. But that usually means there are more bags littered also - supermarket deliveries to picnic locations must happen very frequently on sunny days.
Now an average UK household using a gas boiler might use gas whose use generates around 2 tonnes of CO2 per year. As a rough estimate, I’m picking up litter for recycling that contributed to mitigation of around 400kg CO2 per annum at current carbon intensities of material manufacture and power generation. It’s pretty much effortless, and it didn’t cost anyone anything.
You can probably find a bag as you go (unsurprisingly, they’re often close to litter hot-spots in public parks). Bend your knees, and not your back, and you’ll also be adding to your exercise.
I can’t guess the amount by which plastic pollution is reduced. Undoubtedly, some of the plastic that I ensured was recycled would have been picked up by street cleaners, though there’s plenty that can be found in places street cleaners will probably never visit (roadside verges, laybys, country lanes, woodland, beaches), or if they do, it’ll be a rare occurrence.
The litter picked up by Councils is recycled only in very rare circumstances.
And here’s the punchline. Carbon dioxide doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere very quickly. Once emitted, it stays in the atmosphere for a long time, making its contribution to warming the planet. Its contribution to increasing global temperature persists long after it’s been emitted. As a result, its effect is cumulative. So, everything you or I do to reduce those emissions has the effect - at the margin - of reducing global temperature increase. (It’s illiterate to argue that, “it doesn’t matter what I do because look at what they are doing in …” Everyone’s activity affects the extent of warming.)
All over the world, there are thousands of people doing this. Most are waste pickers, for whom the value of the materials are their main source of income. Unless and until the UK implements a deposit refund scheme, that’s not likely to be the case here in the UK. But it’s worth reflecting on the climate impact of the work that waste pickers do as they seek to generate an income in the most challenging circumstances.
The Quality of Life survey in Bristol - where I live - indicates that 82% of the population think street litter is a problem locally, a figure that rises to 96% in deprived wards of the City. We’re spending part of our remaining carbon budget by chucking it away. We can’t afford to do that.
So, next time you see a plastic bottle, or an aluminium can on the floor, consider what a wasted opportunity it would be to just walk on by.
There’s a climate emergency.
Don’t kick the can down the road.
Help keep the temperature down.
Help make it cool.