Zero Waste World

The Waste Cycle

What happens to the waste that you put in your bin that can't be reduced, reused or recycled?

At the moment it is merely disposed of by being buried in the ground at a landfill site.

In the future it will need to be treated differently to reduce its impact on the environment and to recover valuable resources.

Check out our Zero Waste World illustrated guide to see where everything goes.

Reduction and Education

By understanding why we need to reduce the amount of waste we produce and dispose of, we can make a big difference to the scale of residual waste that needs to be treated.

We all need to make a concerted effort to think about the types of products we are buying, and consider whether they can be reused or recycled.  Do you need them in the first place?  Simple, things like considering changing from products with packaging to those without will make a difference to any household bin or recycling box.

The Waste Journey

Once we have reduced the amount of waste we produce by shopping more sensibly and making changes to our lifestyle we then compost or recycle as much as possible so that resources can be used over and over.

Recycling can take many forms but some of the most common recycling facilities are the kerbside box collections which the Councils run or the on-street recycling banks for more hard to reach properties.  Both of these facilities are generally for collecting recyclable products such as paper, glass, aluminium and card.  Larger recycling centres often provide facilities for a wider range of materials such as wood and scrap metal to name but a few.

All recyclables collected by the Council are then sent for reprocessing.

Landfill

The waste that is left by the householder after separating out recyclable material for collection is what we call residual waste.

This is the mixed waste that goes in your household bin and is usually collected and brought either directly to a landfill site or to a transfer station.

Waste transfer stations, such as the one at Powderhall in Edinburgh are used as central bulking sites for refuse.

There it is compacted and loaded onto trains which carry the waste to a landfill site, in Edinburgh's case to one in Dunbar, East Lothian.  In Midlothian, collection vehicles currently take waste directly to Oatslie, a landfill site near Roslin.

The Future of Waste Treatment

This is where Zero Waste: Edinburgh and Midlothian comes in.  As we can no longer continue to send waste to landfill at the current rate for reasons of government policy, cost and environmental damage, we need to engage new waste treatment processes.

There are numerous different technologies available which treat waste in different ways.  Some of these technologies are relatively new but most have been in use and been refined in other parts of the UK as well as the wider world for decades now.