Bottled out

As I blogged a month or so ago, I'm a bit of a recycling cynic, at least as far as Guernsey's present strategy is concerned. This week the Press joined the party with their article about the bazillion tons of glass, carefully sorted and posted into the green bins by enviro-conscious consumers, and collected and crushed at taxpayers' expense.

After all that work, this multi-coloured crushed glass is now being stockpiled at Longue Hougue and is very possibly destined for landfill after all, because the product of the process is basically worthless. When you think about the insane cost of producing all this crushed glass, largely borne by those who in good faith have gone to great efforts to 'do their bit', you can't help but feel a little bit let down.

The fact that the glass can't be used as aggregate because it hasn't been finely crushed enough is reasonably amusing, but probably beside the point. The point being, what was the point anyway? The Press referred to using glass as aggregate as 'down-cycling'. I think that's something of an understatement.

If we don't use glass as aggregate, then instead we use rock. When rock is quarried, it leaves a hole in the ground which we can use to dump rubbish (like... er... glass). Why go to the trouble of crushing and processing glass to use as an aggregate if it's easier just to use rock (the crushing of which Ronez has down to a fine art), and then dump the glass where the rock came from?

All we've really achieved is to divert a relatively tiny amount of inert waste away from Mont Cuet, but it looks like that was all we would ever have achieved anyway. Even if the glass can be used as aggregate, that's not what any green-minded recycler would really call recycling.

Recycling is supposed to help the environment by reducing energy and resources consumed. What we're doing with this glass doesn't achieve that. In fact all it will achieve is to fractionally extend the lifespan of the tip, and in turn all that will really achieve is to give the States an extra month or so to dither around and put off having to make any difficult decisions about how we should manage our waste.