Waste and climate change
Waste and climate change
Here are a few facts to help them: → Waste that is not disposed of properly significantly contributes to global climate change. Large quantities of hazardous methane gas escape from open landfills or illegal waste dumps. Illegally incinerated waste produces soot which is damaging not only for the climate but also for our health. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), landfills and sewage plants are responsible for about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 2 → Another problem is plastic waste in our oceans. Every year, an estimated 14 million tons of plastic end up in the sea. Marine animals such as seabirds, whales, fish and turtles often mistake plastic waste for prey and ingest it. Many ultimately starve to death because their stomachs are filled with plastic debris. They also suffer from lacerations, infections, reduced ability to swim and internal injuries. → Plastics – so synthetic materials – are made from petroleum, among other things. Over 300 million tons of plastic is produced every year, half of which is used to make single-use items such as shop - ping bags, cups and straws. This means half of all products are used only once and then discarded. 3 Fortunately, more and more laws are being introduced to ban single-use items. But incorrect waste disposal is not the only cause of greenhouse gases. The items that eventually end up in landfills have to be produced in the first place, and these production processes also cause greenhouse gases. Process The participants divide into teams of 4 to 6 people. Each team is given a set of picture cards depicting 10 different objects and time cards representing decomposition times. Each team now assigns the objects to the decomposition times. They have 5 minutes to do this. The time it takes for materials to decompose depends on many different factors, such as exposure to the sun, temperature, humidity, size of the waste pieces and the microorganisms involved. The exact composition of the material is another important factor. Paper, for example, is often coated with varnishes or plastics, which means it takes much longer to break down than if it were only made of cellulose. All the teams present their results (guesses) before the correct answers are revealed. In the next step, the workshop leaders discusses the following questions with the participants: → How important is recycling, and what do we have to consider when we separate waste? Can we recycle everything? Is recycling alone the solution? Recycling is the process of saving used materials and natural resources from landfills and putting them to new use, i.e. making something new out of them. This saves not only resources but also energy. Recycling an aluminium beverage can requires 95% less energy than producing a new one from raw materials. However, recycling aluminium is a complex process because aluminium is rarely used on its own but is mixed with other metals (producing what is known as alloys), which are difficult to separate. During the recycling process, some of the aluminium is lost. This means we cannot just make a new can from an old can. In fact, less than a quarter of the world's aluminium is made from recycled material. Incidentally, an average smartphone is made from about 60 different raw mate - rials, including about 30 different types of metal 4 Recycling plastics (synthetics) poses similar problems. Plastics are made from different materials (made up of molecular chains, or polymers) such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, chlorine or phosphorus. There are many different types of plastics, each with different properties (flexible, rigid, fire-resistant). When different plastics are combined, as is often the case, for example, with cheese packaging, recycling becomes difficult.
If the different plastics cannot be separated, the packaging cannot be recycled. Often, the packaging then has to be incinerated. 5 An average of only 48% of waste produced in Europe was recycled in 2020, in other words barely half. 6 So it's always better to ensure we generate as little waste as possible even when we do our shopping.
Possible questions at the end of the exercise → What can we do during our visit to avoid waste? → What happens to the waste we do produce? → Is the waste collected and disposed of/recycled separately here on site? If so, how can we ensure our waste is properly separated and disposed of?
Want to know more? Anyone interested in doing more on the subject can organise a film evening and show the video "Story of Stuff" .
2 https://www.bmz.de/de/themen/abfallwirtschaft/klimawandel-18518 [last accessed on 12 December 2022] (in German) 3 Cf. https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/marine-plastic-pollution [last accessed on 12 December 2022] 4 https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/muell/darum-ist-aluminium-nicht-gut-fuer-die-umwelt/ [last accessed on 14 December 2022] (in German)
5 https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/abfall-und-recycling/recycling/27543.html [last accessed on 14 December 2022] (in German) 6 https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/reaching-2030s-residual-municipal-waste/reaching-2030s-residual-municipal-waste [last accessed on 14 December 2022]
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