The Global Issue of Landfills and What We Can Do to Help
Have you ever found yourself wondering where your rubbish goes when you throw it away? Most people usually overlook it - but it is something that affects your everyday life. We see this in documentaries like “A plastic ocean”. In Hong Kong, up to 40% of the rubbish thrown ends up getting thrown away each day is food. This can amount to 3,500 tonnes of food being thrown away per day! Plastic ends up at around 790 tonnes per day, but considering one plastic bag weighs around 5 grams, this figure is quite disconcerting. Landfills also cost around $6 billion, but were built in 1980 and made to last until 2020. They now are estimated to last another 5-10 years - but if we recycle and compost, our average waste can be reduced by almost 50%!
Recycling is something that is both easy to do and beneficial for the environment. Most people will probably know the three rules: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Firstly - reduce the amount you use, and use only what you need. Reuse the items you can - for example, bags to carry shopping in such as plastic bags. And, above all, recycle. By converting waste into something reusable, you’re doing all 3 rules: reducing your waste, reusing items and recycling them.
Composting is extremely important if you want to help reduce waste, but also if you want to help with other global issues like global warming. When food waste is put in a landfill, it is compacted and does not biodegrade properly. This causes it to release a very damaging gas called Methane - which is a very prominent cause of global warming. Methane can even be more damaging than carbon dioxide. This is one of the reasons why composting is so important. Compost is organic matter that has been decomposed (this process is known as composting). This process recycles various organic materials otherwise regarded as waste products and produces a soil conditioner (the compost). If you want to start composting, you can try and contact companies such as “Hong Kong Community Composting”. This company helps individuals compost by taking all of the food waste they accumulate and organizing to have it taken into government composting plants. The government does do some things to help but it is not very well known and there is nothing that reaches out to individual people and focuses more on larger groups like schools.
Some other things you can do to regulate food waste are plan your meals or what you need to buy in advance, only buy food you need, try to save up food and finish everything, bring leftovers back home to eat later - and if you can, you can donate food to charities like Food Angel. Furthermore, you can manage expiring dates so food doesn’t go rotten and spread what you know to others so they can also start to make a change! Regulate your use of plastic - try and avoid single-use plastics as much as possible (for instance, asking for no straws at restaurants) and when you do have something plastic, don’t throw it away: either reuse it or recycle it. Be careful though! When there is something that is not made out of plastic in a plastic recycling bin, it will usually all be thrown away since the recycling plants don't have enough people to sort through each individual bin. Places like China are no longer accepting contaminated recyclables and this goes to show how putting something in the wrong bin can cause all the other work people have done to recycle to go to waste.
By not recycling and composting, we could be pushing our planet to a point of no return: i find this inexcusable. Scientists have said that our Earth is heating up so quickly that if we don’t start using renewable energy within the next 17 years, we will reach the point of no return. Because of us, our planet will die. Things need to change. While waste is not the only thing that is getting us to this point, it still plays a part in it and we could, by starting to compost and recycle, give ourselves more time to change other bad habits we have. By recycling and composting, you are making a difference, and if you encourage people to start recycling and composting - or even just spread what you know about this issue, we can save ourselves and our home. So we hope that after reading this article, you’ll go on to do your part in helping save our planet.
If you would like to get involved in composting you can visit Hong Kong Community Composting’s website to learn more and even start composting. Visit https://www.hkcomposting.com/