A load of old rubbish?
Recycling is a new concept in Cyprus that hasn’t been widely adopted – we still throw away more than anyone else in Europe. We look at the rubbish four homes throw away and ask how the situation could improve
I’m a terrible culprit. Sitting at my office desk I glance at the bin closest to me. There’s paper that I’ve made notes on screwed up at the bottom, a couple of plastic water bottles and a Cadburys chocolate wrapper glistening back at me. It’s now only 1pm and my stomach grumbles. I get take out lunch and then commit the biggest sin of all – a convenient plastic knife and fork land in the sorry pile, followed by an aluminium container complete with paper lid.
The hoard of detritus simply gets bigger and bigger as the day goes by. And I don’t think twice before I leave the office because I know that by the next morning the cleaning lady will have kindly emptied it for me. It’s not that I don’t feel bad, because I do, I really do. I know our planet is heading towards environmental disaster, I know I should be recycling, and I know that not separating my rubbish into glass, paper and plastic is certainly not something I should be proud of.
Daring to look at my bin again, I start to multiply my water bottles and papers by approximately 800,000 Cypriots, every day, of every year. Then there’s industrial waste and electronic waste to think about, the list could simply go on and on.
Suddenly, an innocent pile of office waste sitting in the bin next to me has turned into something monstrous.
In Cyprus alone, we throw away approximately 550,000 tones of rubbish each year, most of which ends up in landfills. It’s common knowledge that we don’t recycle anywhere near as much as we should, but not everyone knows that we are also one of the biggest producers of rubbish per person in the EU, where we are bottom of the list of recyclers.
In the UK, 59 per cent of the population are now committed recyclers but in Cyprus the figure is a mere 10 per cent. Ironically, even the UK is not doing as much as it could when it comes to waste management and has even been referred to as ‘the dirty man of Europe’, while other countries in northern Europe, including Finland and the Netherlands, are praised for their efforts.
So it is critical that more of us start to recycle. Even those who do, don’t always realise exactly what should go into the ordinary rubbish bin and what should not. The answer to this problem is simple – we need more readily available information, we need more recycling bins with easy access and we need a more efficient recycling system that targets the whole island. “Before we even come close to reaching European recycling standards, we have to tackle the problem of public awareness,” says an official working at the Environmental Services of the government. “The government has already started distributing informative leaflets in Nicosia and Limassol and has also shown adverts on radio and television. We’re trying to change people’s ways of thinking, but it won’t happen overnight.”
Certainly, if people don’t start doing something very soon, the future will not be pretty. The harsh truth is that whatever you don’t recycle ends up in landfills, thus harming the environment through dangerous emissions. By recycling, you’re not just cutting down CO2 emissions and other dangerous gases, you’re also conserving scarce resources and saving energy – recycling an aluminium tin uses only five per cent of the energy needed to produce a new one.
I ask friends and colleagues if they recycle and very few say yes. Some don’t have the time, others can’t really be bothered. And what do many of them reply when they’re asked if they recycle their household waste? That the idea is all a load of rubbish.
But sometimes they just don’t believe Cyprus has the correct infrastructure to deal with the waste. What’s the point of recycling at home if there’s nowhere to take it or if there’s a chance it may end up in a regular landfill? After all, so far only those living in Nicosia and Limassol have access to bins where they can drop off all the recyclables collected at home. In an age where we should be recycling everything we possibly can, this is simply unacceptable.
Things may be moving along slowly, but all hope has not been lost. The environmental services of the government are attempting to put packaging waste recycling into motion in all parts of the island, and a non-profit organisation was recently set up, named Green Dot, with the main aim of finally doing something to change the way in which waste is dealt with.
From February 2007, Green Dot commenced operation of kurbside household waste recycling from five municipalities on the island. These are the municipalities of Strovolos in Nicosia and Ayios Athanasios, Mesa Yitonia, Yermasoyia and Kato Polemidia in Limassol.
For the material to be properly sorted and recycled, two sorting plants have been developed to serve the system. By mid 2008, at least 400,000 people will be covered by the system and the target is to finally cover the entire island. “We are aiming to change Cyprus from a ‘throw away society’ to a ‘sorting and recycling society’,” says Kyriakos Parpounas, general manager of Green Dot. “As a society, we never really thought about environment much in the past,” says Parpounas. “We only woke up to environmental regulations the moment we joined the EU.” Parpounas explains that in the next couple of years, the company are even hoping to bring into action systems for recycling batteries, electronic waste and tyres.
However, when it comes to saving the planet, it’s not just about recycling – it’s also about reducing the amount of rubbish at home in the first place. “This is now an issue all over Europe,” explains Parpounas. “While everyone is being encouraged to recycle, they are also urged to reduce the amount of waste they collect. Prevention is a key word in this case.”
A huge problem here in Cyprus is that we use far too many plastic bags, and shop assistants seem more than happy to hand out far more bags than are actually necessary, do your melons in a plastic bag need to be put in another at the supermarket? Do your bread and milk need to be put in different bags at the bread shop? Over 2,000 tones of plastic bags are used on the island each year, and when they end up in rubbish dumps they take years to degrade.
While most plastic bags can be recycled, it’s even better if you try and reduce the number of plastic bags you take home with you in the first place. “In every purchasing decision we make there is waste associated. The point is to purchase wisely and try to buy goods packaged in materials that are more environmentally friendly and easily recycled. We need to change our whole consumption culture before we even think about sorting and recycling,” Parpounas says.
Forgetting visits to the shops and looking at the home, one has to wonder whatever happened to good old compost heaps? Certainly in Cyprus, it’s a foreign concept to many. If tea bags, fruit scraps and vegetable peelings end up in a land fill, they are unable to decompose properly because they get squashed under everything else and have no access to air. In the absence of oxygen, they produce methane, which is 23 per cent more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It may sound unbelievable, but without even realising it, your PG Tips are contributing to global warming. Instead of throwing your scraps away, you can easily compost them at home, which is great for the environment as it diverts waste from landfill sites. What’s more, it produces a great free of charge compost.
We simply cannot pretend that we are not approaching environmental crises with global warming more of a threat than ever before. A large part of the solution comes down to taking personal responsibility for
the waste we produce and the ideal is to send for disposal only what cannot possibly be recycled and reused. Sadly, many people secretly still believe that their personal habits won’t make a difference to the future of the planet. But the point is that if everyone said that, the future would be too bleak to even think about.
RECYCLING AT HOME
– In Cyprus you can recycle glass, metal, plastic and paper
– Find out about the closest recycling bins in your area by contacting the Environmental Services of the government or Green Dot- tel: 7000 0090 or visit www.cydot.com.cy
– Make sure that the material is as clean as possible. When recyclable material is collected together with food and other irrelevant material, sorting them becomes difficult.
– Squeeze plastic bottles and tins to save space
DID YOU KNOW THAT?
– 1 recycled tin can would save enough energy to power a television for 3 hours
– 1 recycled glass bottle would save enough energy to power a computer for 25 minutes
– Up to 60 per cent of the rubbish that ends up in the dustbin each year could be recycled
– The unreleased energy contained in the average dustbin each year could power a television for 5,000 hours
– As much as 50 per cent of waste in the average dustbin could be composted
– Glass is 100 per cent recyclable and can be used again and again, but glass that is thrown away and ends up in landfills will never decompose
– Plastic can take up to 500 years to decompose
– An aluminium can that is thrown away and not recycled will still be a can 500 years from now
– There’s no limit to the amount of times aluminium cans can be recycled
Alix Norman
Alix, 31, lives alone. She does not recycle any of her rubbish because she feels that it is not dealt with efficiently even once it has been placed in a recycling bin.
Rubbish:
3 water bottles
2 Chinese take away containers
2 cigarette packets
box of tissues
Pringles container
Dead flowers
paper
kitchen roll
tin cans
Alix’s comment: “I feel the state of recycling here in Cyprus is vastly behind that of the rest of Europe. After watching An Inconvenient Truth I really did feel conscious about what I could do to help save the environment but there’s a lack of education and information as to what each individual can do here. I did give recycling a try once but when I found out that my carefully separated rubbish was going onto the municipal tip I was somewhat disillusioned.”
Expert’s comment: “Alix is talking about recycling experiences in Cyprus in the past. Now things have changed. As of the beginning of this year there are two sorting plants working for Green Dot Cyprus (one in Nicosia and one in Limassol) and serve its projects in five municipalities. These plants can cater for the sorting of about 500,000 – 600,000 people. So there are now organised solutions and we should leave the past behind us and think about the future.”
Dina Chimonas
Dina, 49, lives with her two children, 24 and 21. Accumulating quite a bit of waste by the end of the day, Dina tries to recycle as much as she can. She started recycling about four months ago, but does not recycle paper as she has not found a bin close to her area.
Rubbish:
Tissues
Salad peelings
Cigarette butts
Kitchen roll
½ lemon
paper
teabags
junk mail
old bread
foil
For recycling:
2 milk bottles
1 Comfort container
1 wine bottle
4 aluminium tins
Dina’s comment: “I started to really feel conscious about the environment recently and thought I should start doing my bit to help. Strovolos is a very good area for recycling as I’ve seen plenty of bins around. I think they need to put more bins around the capital in order to encourage people to recycle – not many people would be willing to go seriously out of their way to get to the closest bin.”
Expert’s comment: “Dina is right in the sense that in Strovolos she has seen more recycling bins. Strovolos is actually the only municipality in Nicosia that has two systems running simultaneously for packaging recycling. One is managed by the Government Environment Service and it’s a pilot ending in August 2008. The second system is the Green Dot System which began in February 2007 and will stay there permanently. Central Nicosia has only one system however, the government pilot, but it is expected that the Green Dot System will also expand in central Nicosia (and other municipalities and communities in Nicosia) by May 2008. So things will improve substantially.
Living in Strovolos, Dina does not have to look for bins for paper. Green Dot collects paper twice a month from house to house (call 70000090 to find out which days). She will just have to take her paper out on the specific date and we will collect it.”
Nikki and Chris Dake
Nikki and Chris, in their 60s, are avid recyclers and wish that Cyprus was up to scratch with EU standards so they could do more to manage their waste.
Rubbish bag:
egg shells
tea bags
vegetable peelings
toilet roll
ink cartridge from computer printer
packaging of food contaminated with meat/fish
milk carton
orange juice carton
used pieces of kitchen roll
For recycling:
2 plastic bottles
3 beer tins
newspapers
2 pill pots
1 shampoo container
1 wine bottle
6 batteries (Nikki recharges these)
Nikki’s comment: “I particularly worry about batteries going into a landfill, as they pollute the earth for generations to come. Cyprus must learn to do more about recycling. It’s horrible to hike around the beautiful foothills in spring and find dead fridges, builders’ rubble, ancient plastics and the carcases of old cars just tipped over a ravine or dumped in fields.” Nikki and Chris’ garden refuse was composted
Experts comment: “Nikki is right in her opinions and is recycling all she can for now. Things are now changing though due to the harmonisation of our legislation with the European Law. Change is already in motion and there is much more to come in the next months.”
Katina and Micheal Apeitos
Katina and Micheal, 40, live with their 9-year-old daughter. They do not recycle and feel that maybe if they were better informed about how to deal with their waste, they would take action.
Rubbish:
1 newspaper
3 supermarket fliers
1 glass wine bottle
1 cereal box
1 egg carton
2 yogurt pots
1 glass jam jar
1 butter carton
1 plastic milk bottle
3 plastic carrier bags
5 envelopes (post)
2 tin cans
4 soft drink cans
Katina’s comment: “When we were living in England recycling was part of daily life. The public here in Cyprus should be actively encouraged to dispose of rubbish wisely and champion recycling. It’s the only way forward and the only way out of this mess.”
Experts comment: “What is common practice in the UK (with the collection of recyclable waste from homes) has now at last begun in Cyprus but it takes time to cover the whole island. After our legislation harmonisation with the EU, there are now clear legal responsibilities for the management of certain streams of waste.
The two recycling schemes for packaging already running in Nicosia and Limassol, will eventually expand and cover the rest of the island. There is a positive spirit both at government level and local authority level, and this will help the system grow quickly and should be in Paphos in the following months. It is now just a matter of time.”
