JEDDAH,7 March 2007 — Her name is Sophia and she’s about four years old. She has a cheeky grin on a chubby, whitish face and pink cheeks. She is neat and well groomed when she’s at school and gloriously windblown when she’s not. She lives in one of the many shantytowns that make up the suburbs of the sprawling industrial city here.
Sophia is undernourished and underprivileged and on top of it, the tiny house she lives in with her family is right next to a landfill.
At least, one day it’ll be a landfill. Right now it’s just a rubbish dump, and crows and kites rule over it and street dogs and feral cats rummage through it. So ends the organic material dumped in the plot - in the stomachs of the scavengers. The plastic, the glass and the metal don’t end. They stay right where they are but Sophia doesn’t know this.
Her father is a very able man. He earns enough money to feed his family, but for luxuries like sending all his children to school, he decides he will have to do some extra work. He looks at the rubbish dump, and has an idea. He will collect material for recycling! Right now, all he knows is that this will help him financially. He will soon find another angle to it.
As consumers, both in the developed and developing worlds, we use an unimaginable quantity of material every single day and then just throw it out. We think nothing of the waste we are creating. As a result we are running out of landfill sites and litter is piling up everywhere. With only a little consciousness all of us can help. To start with, we can reduce our use of various materials, especially those that are made from nonrenewable resources and which are nonbiodegradable. Like plastic bags.
And if we think about it, there are a whole lot of things that we can effectively re-use or recycle too. For example, empty Tetra Pak milk and juice cartons can be recycled in a paper mill and converted into paper products.
Our daily waste includes products made of paper, like cardboard cups and from plastic and metal. For paper products whole forests of trees have to be cut down; so why not recycle them. Today responsible companies derive all their wood for making paper from sustainably managed forests, under this method, new forests are grown all the time to replace the trees cut down or “harvested”. Plastic is made from materials coming from fossil fuels, which are finite, and so is the amount of metal remaining in the earth. So whatever we cannot re-use can be recycled. Recycling, whichever way you look at it, not only makes sense but is vitally needed.
Even though he’s not looking at the big picture, it makes sense to Sophia’s father. He goes through the dump with eager anticipation, digs out empty beverage cartons and starts collecting them in huge quantities. Then he takes them to a big paper mill. They are happy to see him and give him money, and explain to him how he is helping save trees, and how that is good because trees give oxygen, hold on to topsoil, balance rivers and streams and make up ecosystems that provide homes for birds and insects and other life-forms.
Though he is almost illiterate, Sophia’s father is inspired and he is thinking. If paper cartons can be recycled, why not the plastic and metal waste too? Why should he also not collect plastic and metal waste in separate heaps and sell this off to people who will recycle them? He understands all this in a way, but mostly he is happy because he now has an additional source of income and can send his children to school, so that they will understand it better than he can.
Given the great need to actively promote the concept of recycling, it is surprising how few people or even corporate entities are doing something about it. Companies who are driving recycling all over the world are few and far between. For the earth’s billions we need development to ensure that all that’s good on this planet is protected, such as a basic standard of living for everyone, enough food, health care and education. And we need to make sure that all this is sustainable, that we’re not using up the planet’s resources faster than we can replenish them. So that while there may be enough for our generation, there’ll be nothing left for Sophia and her children.
We need sustainable development, and in this the re-use and recycling of resources is a key factor. Fortunately, a new trend suggests that big business is more environmentally conscious now than ever before, and is playing a role in trying to protect the good things on this earth, sometimes even at the cost of economic viability. Recycling as a profession is necessarily more feasible for people low on the income ladder. Many big companies are also working to solve the waste problems as they begin to understand their role in sustainable development. Their own research is contributing toward the invention of environment-friendly products, such as WIDE, a new packaging material for beverages that is thinner yet stronger than ordinary packaging material. It requires fewer polymers to produce, which means fewer shipping containers and a smaller amount of energy used in transport.
Big businesses are also helping to set up recycling companies and plants, as well as awareness programs for the general public. There is also great innovation in the industry: In Brazil, a recycling plant has been set up to obtain plasma from the aluminum and polyethylene layers in food cartons. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, after solid, liquid and gas. In an oxygen-free chamber containing the aluminum and polyethylene, the inert gas argon is pumped and set on fire. Because there is no oxygen, the materials melt rather than burn and pollute the atmosphere. The result is paraffin, which is sold off to the petrochemicals industry. Isn’t that clever?
Innovations such as this type of recycling take care of the economic question as well as the one of sustainable development: The plasma plant is expected to bring in four million euros a year.
Sophia knows nothing of all this. She is happy in the knowledge that her present is good. For the future she expects the best with all the enthusiasm of youth, even though the earth’s resources are dwindling and its population increasing. But Sophia knows nothing of this, either.