Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 243

There are very few things we can buy without packaging and, though there are clear benefits, in terms of displaying goods attractively and guaranteeing the safety of products, there are major drawbacks too.

Waste generation is closely tied to the relative prosperity of countries. Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, for example – countries that quite recently moved towards the model of Western capitalism and consumer culture – generate less than half the waste per capita of the USA, Denmark and Australia. However, the more established high-consumption societies do now manage their waste more effectively. As figure 5.4 shows, countries such as Germany, Norway and Ireland are steadily reducing the proportion of waste that ends up in landfill. The European Union aims to become a ‘recycling society’, and there is a move to recycle or compost waste (50 per cent of all municipal waste in the European economic area by 2020) as well as to reduce the amount of packaging used for products at the point of production (European Environment Agency 2013).

The industrialized societies are often called ‘throw-away societies’ because the volume of items discarded as a matter of course is so large. In most countries of the industrialized world, waste collection services are almost universal, but it is increasingly difficult to dispose of the enormous amounts of waste. Landfill sites are becoming full and many urban areas have run out of disposal room. In Scotland, for example, around 90 per cent of household waste was still going to landfill sites in 2006, and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency reported that household waste was growing at 2 per cent per annum.

Figure 5.4 Proportion of municipal waste going to landfill, by European economic area country, 2001 and 2010

Source: European Environment Agency (2013: 21).

The international trade in waste led to the export of plastic waste to China for recycling, where waste was often sorted by hand in poorly regulated working environments that produced environmental degradation. However, in 2018 China banned the import of plastics and other solid wastes for recycling, forcing national governments to look for alternative ways of dealing with their material waste. India and Malaysia followed, banning the importation of solid plastic waste in 2019, and Thailand announced a similar ban from 2021 (Lee 2019).

UK government statistics show that recycling rates increased from 40.4 per cent in 2010 to 45.7 per cent by 2017. Over the same period, the proportion of biodegradable waste going to landfill also fell, from 36 to 21 per cent (Defra 2019b). So, although the amount of household waste has been increasing, more of this is recycled year on year (Defra 2016). Although the amount of household waste recycled may still seem low in comparison with the overall amount produced, a large proportion of what is thrown away cannot be easily reprocessed or reused. Many plastics employed in food packaging simply become unusable waste and have to be buried in refuse tips, where they may remain for centuries. Recycling is becoming a huge industry around the world, but there is still a long way to go to transform the world’s ‘throw-away societies’.

Recycling of household waste has increased as it has become built into the routines of everyday life.

In the developing world, the biggest problem with domestic waste is the lack of refuse collection services. It has been estimated that 20 to 50 per cent of domestic waste in the developing world goes uncollected. Poorly managed waste systems mean that refuse piles up in the streets, contributing to the spread of disease. Over time it is very likely that the developing world will have to deal with problems of waste disposal that are even more acute than those in industrialized countries. This is because, as societies become richer, there is a gradual shift from organic waste, such as food remains, to plastic and synthetic materials, such as packaging, which take much longer to decompose.