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I always find waste disposal in other countries fascinating. Usually the garbage along the highway gives you a lot of information on how serious the country is about garbage. And of course one shouldn’t generalize - a province or municipality can buck a national trend. Currently I’m in Turkey and have made several observations.
The first thing I saw was a huge truck in a public square hauling up a fixed garbage can. Under it was a giant receptacle (about 15’ x 10’ x 10’) that was hoisted and swung over an awaiting truck where the bottom opened and a ton of mixed waste was dropped. So I started to look around for any signs of recycling. There were none because it seems Turkey doesn’t have a national recycling program. There was an occasional stop that had waste sorted but apparently that is private. The stats are that they recycled 6% of plastic. Unfortunately 5% of that was imported waste and only 1% was local. But no; no plastic, no paper, no metal and no drink container recycling (made worse by the fact everyone drinks water from plastic bottles - I’ve used more plastic water bottles in the last two weeks than I have in the last two years at home ). Consequently, the ditches, river banks and fields all seem to be covered with assorted plastic. Fill delivered to building sites is full of trash. There is a plan to increase recycling in Turkey but it seems stalled. My mind automatically goes to how this can happen. You could blame low prices for recycled materials - cheaper to make new than recycle old (this explains why private recycling is so rare in Turkey). You could blame governments for not acting (fair, but my observation is that governments only act when there is a problem - municipalities get interested in recycling and green waste management when the landfill is getting full and it would be costly or impossible to expand because of NIMBY syndrome). You could blame industry but they have a responsibility to their shareholders not to the environment. You could even say it is too expensive so why bother. But the real problem is that we have a history of paying only a portion of the cost for our consumer goods. We pay for the production and distribution. Disposal has always been cheap or free so we have not worried about that. Now that disposal is getting more expensive and end of life consumer goods are threatening to drown us, we begin to act. BC and now the rest of Canada is moving towards the Producer Pays system of Stewardship programs. Of course you and I pay for it in the cost of goods, but it is nice to know that there is an end of life plan for consumer goods that is responsible. Of course we have to show off our success so that the bulk of North America and other Nations of the world join us. That may be the larger problem! -Kim Harris |