You can't put your muck in our dustbin

In the South Yorkshire mining community where I grew up there was a verse we used to sing as children:

You can't put your muck in our dustbin,
Our dustbin, Our dustbin.
You can't put your muck in our dustbin,
'Cos Our dustbin's full.

The following news story has caused quite a stir here today where many residents think they are saving the planet by washing out their plastic milk bottles and getting the manager to deliver them to the local tip in her car!

Made in Britain, dumped in China
How our waste causes death and disease 6,000 miles from home
By Clifford Coonan in Beijing
Published: 26 January 2007
Mounds of foul-smelling waste stand rotting in the cold air. The dark, smog-choked sky lowers menacingly and the river runs slowly, a black tide of toxic sludge. Sandwich boxes carrying the labels of British supermarket chains poke through the dumps; crumpled pizza wrappers and plastic bags blanket the streets. Working in the middle of it all are children, some as young as four, sifting though the waste with their bare hands.
Lianjiao, a remote Chinese village in the booming southern province of Guangdong, is a long way for a plastic bag to travel; but it is where almost all British supermarket carrier bags end up. And the foil-lined crisp packets. And the triangular hard plastic packaging for your bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches from a top high-street chain. Because China is rapidly becoming Britain's biggest rubbish dump.
Regardless of how carefully you separate your waste, there is a good chance a disposal firm will dump it all in together with other kinds of plastic trash and ship it to the developing world to be dealt with by a family of migrant workers earning a pittance. They will deal with the salad-bar container, the pistachio ice-cream container and the superfluous bag for carrots in your shopping basket in a variety of different ways - it may be recycled, it may become landfill or it may simply be burnt. Whatever happens, it is generally not a priority for the waste disposal company. Britain dumps around two million tonnes of waste in China every year, everything from plastic mineral water bottles to shopping bags and other forms of superfluous packaging from some of the country's biggest supermarkets.
A huge amount of it arrives in 10-ton shipments in Lianjiao, a village which has become a centre for processing plastic waste - much of it from Britain. The high levels of pollution in the nearby river and the poisoned sky are the price of waste disposal in the developing world.
So too are the many and varied health complaints suffered by the local population, who risk multiple skin ailments and exposure to potent carcinogens as they touch the contaminated materials. Poisonous chemical effluents stream into their water supply, turning it black or lurid red, and studies by Greenpeace show that acid rain is the norm in this region. Children are prone to fevers and coughs. Their skin is often disfigured by the toxic plastic waste they have to process.
They are victims of Britain's addiction to excessive packaging, highlighted in this newspaper's Campaign Against Waste.
According to figures from China's environmental watchdog, the village handles more than 200,000 tonnes of plastic a year, a big chunk of it imported illegally. "China strictly bans any imports of waste that cannot be recycled as raw materials or be treated harmlessly in the country," according to the State Environmental Protection Administration (Sepa). " Driven by profits, some dealers collaborate with overseas law breakers and illegally smuggle or import rubbish into China, causing damage to people's health and to the environment."
In Lianjiao, plastic sandwich wrappers from British high-street shops are sprayed with chemicals to remove the food debris and then hosed down, the effluent running into the Pearl river, one of the world's most polluted waterways. A large proportion of the plastic waste - that which is not fit for recycling - is burnt in incinerators or kilns, or melted down in acid baths. The air is filled with heady toxic smoke.
The local government has banned unlicensed firms from the plastic-waste business and halted the operation of plastic-waste processing factories that are not equipped with environmental protection facilities.
"But, driven by immediate interests, some local people still try to introduce polluting material into China, posing a threat to the environment and to public health," Sepa says.
Sepa is negotiating with European Union agencies on finding ways to stop cross-border movements of waste and preventing illegal domestic-waste smuggling. The watchdog called on developed countries to respect the terms of the 1989 Basel Convention, which bans the export of toxic rubbish from developed countries to the Third World. The US has not signed up to the agreement, but the UK and other European countries have.
According to Chinese figures, rubbish imports from abroad have grown steadily in the past decade and 70 per cent of toxic plastic produced around the world each year now finds its way illegally into China. Ninety per cent of this waste is broken down in small workshops like those in Lianjiao.
"According to our understanding, a lot of waste is coming from Britain and other places in Europe," says an official. "This damages health all right, but a lot of the workers here are migrant workers who come from even poorer provinces, so it's a sacrifice they are prepared to make." Some of these workers earn little more than £1.50 a day for treating the materials.
No company in Lianjiao has official approval to import waste. There is awareness of the problem at the highest level of government and top environmental agencies have pledged to resolve the issue, but local corruption and the lure of a quick couple of pounds per tonne of rubbish makes it difficult to enforce rules.
A report by the University of Shantou on the town of Guiyu, another Guangdong recycling hub, showed that more than 80 per cent of local children suffer from lead poisoning.
Among the plastic at Lianjiao was the wrapping for a pack of Cathedral City cheddar, one of Britain's best-selling brands of cheese. Dairy Crest, which makes the cheese but has no control over what happens to its packaging, confirmed last night the wrapping was non-recyclable.
The company said in a statement: "The food safety laws and our commitment to maintain quality and taste require Cathedral City's packaging to be laminated to act as an oxygen barrier. Therefore, the current packaging is non-recyclable. However, we are aggressively investigating the latest technology to see if it is possible to recycle the packaging in the future."
How you can help
Do you have an example of absurd packaging? Have you been infuriated by the waste with something you bought?
If so, tell us and we will highlight it in The Independent and take it up with the companies concerned. Send your examples to waste@ independent.co.uk

Stir up Sunday

The last Sunday of the Church Year, or the Sunday before Advent, is often called 'Stir-up Sunday'. The term comes from the opening words of the collect for the day in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and later:
Stir-up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Christmas Pudding DayStir-up Sunday is traditional on this day for everyone in the family to take a turn at stirring the Christmas pudding, whilst making a wish.
Before Christmas puddings were sold ready-made in foil containers, they were always made at home. On Stir-up Sunday families returned from Church and gave the pudding its traditional lucky stir.
Children chanted his rhyme:
Stir up, we beseech thee,The pudding in the pot;And when we get homeWe'll eat the lot.
Christmas Pudding Traditions
A proper Christmas pudding is always stirred from East to West in honour of the three Wise Men.
A Christmas pudding is traditionally made with 13 ingredients to represent Christ and His Disciples.
Every member of the family must give the pudding a stir and make a secret wish.
A coin was traditionally added to the ingredients and cooked in the pudding. It was supposedly to bring wealth to whoever found it on their plate on Christmas Day. The traditional coin was an old silver sixpence or threepenny bit.
Other traditional additions to the pudding included a ring, to foretell a marriage, and a thimble for a lucky life.

However national and local press yesterday warn about "clear out and recycle" weekend rather than "stir up weekend". Ominously outside our chapel door there are bags for paper and boxes for plastic and glass. Our local council cabinet are due to discuss radical revisions to refuse collection arrangements to meet tough new government recycling targets - fortnightly instead of weekly collections involving residents sorting their rubbish into different recycling bins. The bins will be colour coded and there will be penalties not only for not complying but also for putting wrong items in wrong boxes.

My daily national asked yesterday if recycling is eco-terrorism at the end of an article by Claudia FitzHerbert "Who will save me from this wheelie-bin insanity?"(telegraph.co.uk/comment). "A platoon of wheelie bins appeared in my street last week. I was running a fever at the time and thought at first they were partof my illness.... my head is swimming with rubbish - what it is, where to put it, the colour of the box, the bin, the bag, the street, the week.....council recycling is farting around.....real greens don't shop, nor do they chuck. The council has created a mountain of plastic wheelie bins in the name of ecology. It's a scandal."

Yesterday Oxford. Tomorrow Scarborough. Beware the end is nigh!