Author information: Martin Green is head of recovered paper procurement at UPM Shotton as well as being the chairman of PaperChain.PaperChain is a campaign sponsored by the papermaking sector members of the Confederation of Paper Industries (CPI) that rely on recovered paper as their primary raw material.
Children can be wonderfully perceptive and precise in their observations. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle is something that every child knows from their first days of being placed lovingly in front of CBeebies.
We're in the middle of moving house and the inevitable amount of unwanted “stuff” is being dumped at the local civic amenity site and this gave rise to the perhaps inevitable question from our eldest son (Stephen aged 4) “why aren't you recycling it dad?”
You see, children just don't understand the practicalities of adult life; that it's too time consuming to re-use our “stuff” by, for example, putting it on a reuse website. And they certainly don't understand the hassle and difficulty of sorting things so that they can be recycled or re-used. Children just know its wrong and tell you straight.
Children intuitively know that recycling is important and that recyclable material must be either collected or sorted into clean, good quality grades. Intuitively children know that mixing glass with plastic or paper doesn't make sense.
Quality
Lower quality, contaminated material may indeed find a market, because global demand for resources is so strong, (that's the point of recycling, resources are valuable), but contamination is waste that cannot be recycled and the environmental cost of transporting and cleaning outweighs the benefits, ask any four year old.
The conundrum is that while industry promotes segregated collection systems, with good quality and lower risk, the public sector has challenging recycling and landfill diversion targets.
The temptation is to introduce collection and recycling systems that may increase recycling rates but without consideration for the needs of the re-processor, and the environmental impact of poor quality recycling. And this is the point; we should not be sacrificing good recycling because it makes life easier. Quality is the cornerstone of successful recycling.
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