May is the peak time for climbers to make the attempt on Mount Everest. This year (2018) 29 teams are aiming to achieve the ascent. Under rules established by the Nepal Government in 2014, each team member has to bring back at least 8 kg of rubbish that he or she has generated, to prevent Everest becoming the “highest waste tip in the world”. Prior to 2014, climbing teams always left tons of rubbish at their camps. Now there are special climbing expeditions just to remove this rubbish off the mountain.
Everything we do, eat, drink or make produces rubbish. Domestic rubbish consists, among other things, of dust, scraps of food, vegetable and fruit peelings, eggshells, cardboard boxes, polythene bags, plastic water and soft drink bottles, sweet and crisp and cigarette packets, cellophane and acetate wrappers, toothpaste tubes and brushes, sanitary products, paper, wood, glass bottles, metal tins and cans, batteries, washing materials, rags, scourers and many small broken bits of solid plastic.
Every day we see photos of plastic and rubbish pollution, degrading the environment and our oceans, spoiling tourist attractions and posing serious health hazards. Plastic particles are getting into our food and water, in the fish we eat, the air we breathe.
In my travels over the last 10 years, in Nepal, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, I have seen how people deal with this rubbish. Most is swept up daily and put into plastic bags, which when full are placed in an area outside the house for later collection and disposal. In Indonesia, where I lived for a month in 2008 in a remote village in the dry south of the island of Sulawesi, I collected the rubbish into plastic bags and stored these against an external wall. By the next day, these bags had been torn open by some animal and the contents scattered again, by the animal and the wind, across the ground, making my whole effort the day before completely useless! Because I had concentrated the waste into a few plastic bags, the problem was worse than if I had done nothing at all. I was confronted by deep environmental and philosophical choices – do I bury the waste, leave it as it is on the ground, or burn it? I decided that burning the rubbish was the least of 3 evils. When I attempted to burn my pile of rubbish, it burnt very slowly and smokily due to it being damp, and it never caught fire but just smoldered all day with a horrible smell. These events taught me a valuable lesson. Because rubbish was not a problem to the local villagers, who lived with it daily and were not offended by the sight of it, I came to think that waste and rubbish disposal was an attitude of mind and a Western concept, that aesthetics and public health were not an issue for the locals, so why should it be for me? No doubt, if I had continued living there, eventually I, too, would not have bothered to do anything about the waste and rubbish.
The choices for waste disposal today are basically the same as those I faced in my isolated, remote village in Indonesia in 2008 – Bury, Burn or Leave.
Bury, or Landfill, is the preferred option for many large cities, including Kathmandu. The problem is that landfill requires large areas of suitable land near a city, causes disruption and anger to local inhabitants and can cause health hazards and wild animal encroachment.
Burn, or Incineration, is another option used. There is still the requirement for waste to be transported to an out of town site, where the incinerator can generate heat to power electricity, and emissions have to be controlled with expensive equipment and technology to prevent toxic micro-organisms entering the atmosphere.
Leave on the ground is the third option, where there IS no other option.
In Nepal I have participated in 2 major environmental programs to address the problem of waste disposal. In 2008, I wrote a report on the effects of Tourism on Biodiversity in the Chitwan National Park. This noted the efforts of concerned local people to combat waste and rubbish created by the tourism and hotel industry, by organizing rubbish collection points and trying to establish a waste sorting and re-cycling centre, where waste could be sorted into glass, metal and compostable material. These efforts are on-going.
The second program I was involved in was the Bhagmati River Clean Up Operation, where I worked with a team from the Global Peace Foundation Nepal to remove plastic bags and much other rubbish from Kathmandu’s major river. This is also an on-going effort and gives me hope that local communities acting together consistently over a long period of time can make a real difference.
These are my observations, and suggestions for dealing with “waste disposal”:
Combatting waste and environmental degradation.
- Education is the key to combating environmental degradation. Teaching about global warming by the burning of carbon and CO2 emissions, reducing emissions, the need to clear up and dispose of waste safely. Teaching the whole family about food composting, growing organic food, using less packaging.
- Pressure should be brought to bear by governments on manufacturers, designers and plastic engineers to manufacture more durable products, to make them thicker or with stronger polymers, and not designed to wear out within six months. The advantages of this are two-fold: firstly the better-made products will not be discarded so quickly, and secondly, the slight extra cost of the product will marginally affect the purchasing decisions of millions of people, who may therefore not buy a product they may have bought if cheaper. Governments may be accused of interfering in the market economy, but they are doing so already by the banning and taxing of plastic products, and this will only increase in future years.
- The food and cosmetics industries also must reduce the amount of unnecessary wrapping and packaging, if necessary by law.
- Governments must now act (as in the UK) to prevent the plastic waste scourge, by introducing taxes and regulations on plastic and wrapping use, and promoting advertising campaigns to re-cycle waste, home-compost food waste, and encourage scientists to look for alternative materials.
- Technology is all the time developing new machines to collect waste, to sort and re-cycle it.
- Plastic can be recycled and moulded to produce panels for home building, processed for material to make road surfaces (as in India), re-processed by conversion into fuel oil and black carbon, and houses can be insulated with discarded plastic components.
C. Tim Taylor 2018.