Is India UK’s dump yard?
This is one of the most shocking news I have heard recently. It turns out that all the carefully separated and collected waste from UK homes that are judiciously segregated into different categories: plastics, metal, paper and glass so that they all can be recycled, are actually brought in tones from UK and dumped into a state called Tamil Nadu in southern India!
It seems it is much cheaper for the waste to be transferred half way across the world to a rather known-to-be-dirty country, than recycle the waste as promised by the government. It costs up to 148 pounds to recycle a ton of rubbish once it is separated but only 40 pounds to ship it to India.
All this has been discovered by a television channel who investigated and found out receipts that belonged to people in the UK, newspapers, wafer packets, school reports and all other kind of rubbish in India that belonged to some people living miles and miles away in London.
Now I had heard UK was administrating all kinds of novel technologies to really curb the waste issue and recycle it, but really did not know that this was the original idea they had in mind. For a country that is known as one of the most powerful, advanced, techno savvy countries of the world, this comes as a fine example of their actual ways and intentions. Climate change and global warming may hit UK later, but right now it has to deal with heated environmentalist around the world and the wrath of Indians who are not at all going to leave this issues without a clean and clear apology from the UK government for turning their country into a garbage bin.
On the other hand, it is actually inspiration for innovative recycling techniques for which UK should actually look at India. Here you will find hundreds of human scavengers every day toiling away among waste to find plastic waste that can be used for melting, reshaping and moulding new plastic items. You can find tiny bits of soaps being melted and again made into soap bars to be used for washing hands. You can see scraps of metals reinvented into somethig useful like a chair’s part or a lever for a machine.
The level of recycling in the UK is deeply disappointing,' says Claire Wilton, of Friends of the Earth. 'There is a lot to learn from the developing world, where a scavenger mentality, grass roots recycling and sheer necessity can lead to imaginative leaps in redeploying waste.'
The garbage bin called India has a lot more to offer to UK and the rest of the world regarding the recycling issue that can help them save money not by dumping their waste to another land but by actually employing innovative and workable solutions to the waste problem. If only they woke up to the fact.
It seems it is much cheaper for the waste to be transferred half way across the world to a rather known-to-be-dirty country, than recycle the waste as promised by the government. It costs up to 148 pounds to recycle a ton of rubbish once it is separated but only 40 pounds to ship it to India.
All this has been discovered by a television channel who investigated and found out receipts that belonged to people in the UK, newspapers, wafer packets, school reports and all other kind of rubbish in India that belonged to some people living miles and miles away in London.
Now I had heard UK was administrating all kinds of novel technologies to really curb the waste issue and recycle it, but really did not know that this was the original idea they had in mind. For a country that is known as one of the most powerful, advanced, techno savvy countries of the world, this comes as a fine example of their actual ways and intentions. Climate change and global warming may hit UK later, but right now it has to deal with heated environmentalist around the world and the wrath of Indians who are not at all going to leave this issues without a clean and clear apology from the UK government for turning their country into a garbage bin.
On the other hand, it is actually inspiration for innovative recycling techniques for which UK should actually look at India. Here you will find hundreds of human scavengers every day toiling away among waste to find plastic waste that can be used for melting, reshaping and moulding new plastic items. You can find tiny bits of soaps being melted and again made into soap bars to be used for washing hands. You can see scraps of metals reinvented into somethig useful like a chair’s part or a lever for a machine.
The level of recycling in the UK is deeply disappointing,' says Claire Wilton, of Friends of the Earth. 'There is a lot to learn from the developing world, where a scavenger mentality, grass roots recycling and sheer necessity can lead to imaginative leaps in redeploying waste.'
The garbage bin called India has a lot more to offer to UK and the rest of the world regarding the recycling issue that can help them save money not by dumping their waste to another land but by actually employing innovative and workable solutions to the waste problem. If only they woke up to the fact.

















