October 30, 2025
"Rot on the landscape"
Alan Taylor
You can set your watch by the arrival of the binmen and their voracious lorry, as it makes its way down our street on bin day. In bygone years, a posse of ragged men trotted after the belching vehicle, desperately hurrying to keep apace with it. They looked like Dickensian characters , dusted with soot and ash like a sprinkling of chocolate on a cappuccino. The bins were made of metal and the noise was atonally symphonic. If Shostakovich were interested in waste management, this was the kind of music he might have composed.
Now, however, the business is almost noiseless and the men are few. Their job is to position the plastic bins so that the lorry can lift them up and tip out their contents mechanically. What was once dirty, smelly, undesirable work – binmen were one rung above scaffolders in the employment hierarchy – is now a job like many others.
This is how John Paterson, who is employed in waste management in the City of Edinburgh’s environmental and consumer services department, got into the waste business. As a student, he swept the streets and worked on the bins and saw what people were prepared to throw away. Unlike his hard-up contemporaries, he was the owner of a colour television and a video recorder. There was no cooler student at the University of Stirling. “I suddenly realised that the waste business was full of gold,” he says.
Paterson, a burly 35-year-old, and the men he employs are in the front line of the ecological war against waste. His mission is to make us think about what we throw away and why. His mantra, coined by the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, is “reduce, reuse, recycle”. At a mundane local level, he wants to keep the streets litter-free. More ambitiously, he hopes that the less rubbish we send to landfill sites, the more we will be able to reduce global warming. Ultimately, like Superman, he wants to save the planet.
WHERE better to start, then, than in one’s own house, every one of which is a miniature time-bomb. Like it or lump it, we all create waste, some more than others. Day in, day out, we are creating a problem we have yet to find the solution to. “Every day,” writes Heather Rogers in her new book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life Of Garbage, “a phantasmagoric rush of spent, used and broken riches flows through our homes, offices and cars, and from there is burned, dumped at sea, or more often buried under a civilised veil of dirt and grass seed.”
Inevitably, the United States is “the world’s number one producer of garbage”, consuming 30% of all the planet’s resources and producing 30% of all its waste, despite the fact that it has just 4% of the world’s population. According to Rogers, every American discards over 1600lbs of rubbish a year, or four-and-a-half pounds per person every day. “And,” she adds, “over the past generation, our mountains of waste have doubled.”
Not that we in the United Kingdom have anything to be complacent about. It’s estimated that, if current trends continue, over the next two decades the amount of waste we produce will grow by nearly 3% every year. It is not hard to see why. In this age of convenience, everything we buy comes packaged: muesli, milk, marmalade, orange juice, bread, butter, tea. And that’s just breakfast. Today’s newspaper is no longer tomorrow’s fish-supper wrapping. Like everything else we don’t need, we dump it.
We are constantly acquiring and discarding. Through the letter-box come unsolicited junk mail – catalogues, charity Christmas cards, irresistible credit offers, unignorable computer updates – which go immediately into the bin. Nothing, it seems, can stem the flow. We live, we are told, in a consumer society. For society to survive and thrive we must buy, buy, buy. Nobody these days darns socks or patches jeans, unless they’re fashion victims. Out with the old, goes the cry, in with the new.
Nothing is surer to fail than a product which its manufacturers boast will last forever. Show me tights that don’t ladder, shoes that never need heeled, or a tyre that never loses its tread, and I will show you a business heading towards bankruptcy. We have grown accustomed to change for the sake of it. It began with the car industry, when, in the 1950s, General Motors annually overhauled the bodies of each model. Ford followed shortly thereafter, hiring a former stylist for women’s clothing as its chief designer. Appearance, not performance, was what drove sales. Built-in obsolescence was the new buzz phrase, after which came the disposable commodity. Nappies and razors blazed the trail. In the early 1960s, one US company even manufactured single-use aluminum kitchen utensils – “no fuss with the washing, just throw out the dirty pan”.
It took a while, though, for this philosophy to cross the Atlantic. Growing up in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s, one was constantly reminded to “waste not, want not”. Plates had to be cleared and clothes worn until they fell apart. Partly this was because of poverty, partly a response to Presbyterianism. We rinsed milk bottles and collected their foil caps because Val Singleton on Blue Peter told us to. Leftovers and peelings were added to the compost heap in the back garden. With no fridge in which to keep things cool, food was bought fresh and used as required. Nothing was ever allowed to go past its sell-by date because the very concept would have been ridiculous. The highlight of the social calendar was the local rugby club’s seven-a-side tournament, when we youngsters collected empty beer bottles and returned them for a few pence each. We didn’t appreciate it at the time, but we were natural recyclists, tyro eco-warriors, pioneer conservationists.
“Many people today feel at least a little uneasy about the profusion of garbage that our society produces,” says Rogers. What we can do about it, however, is what John Paterson calls “the 64,000 dollar question”. Bombarded by adverts, assailed by sleek, gleaming, relatively cheap products guaranteed to revolutionise our lives, ingrained to believe that last year’s model renders us incapable of functioning, we find it easier to discard than fix. Your DVD player’s playing up. What do you do? Get it repaired – standard charge approximately £50 – or buy a new one at Argos for £19.99? It’s a no-brainer. And, as every generation sends a new star up the pop charts, we are seduced by technologies with which to amuse ourselves, which all too soon are rendered redundant: 78s, LPs, cassettes, videos, CDs, DVDs. The portable cassette player is usurped by the mini-disc, the iPod by the all-singing, all-dancing, all-encompassing mobile phone. No sooner have we got the hang of one, than we’re told it must go, and go they do.
“E-waste,” remarks Rogers, “is virulent stuff. And there’s so much of it. The electronics industry, most notably producers of cell phones and personal computers, has brought built-in obsolescence to dizzying new heights … The pressure and enticement to consume more electronics at ever-faster rates, thanks to unrelenting fashion and technological innovations, are fuelling a vast new garbage boom.
“The current industry-projected lifespan for personal computers is about two years. Today, there are over 100 million people using PCs in the US alone. Since 1997, the country has produced a tidal wave of junked laptops, monitors and hard drives estimated in excess of 300m. And, in addition to PCs, 3.2m tonnes of other high-tech hardware gets tossed every year.”
Guilt is not an uncommon response to such a litany. In one’s own home, one looks around in dismay as the bins daily fill up. Of course, packaging accounts for a lot of it: the plastic bottle containing the milk, the packet for the muesli, the jar for the marmalade, the tub for the butter. Whether we want them or not, we are plied with carrier bags which in time will come to nest almost naturally in trees. Some supermarket chains, such as Lidl, charge for carrier bags, in an eco-friendly gesture.
But it is small beer. The boldest move against packaging was made in Germany in 1991, with the passing of the Packaging Ordinance, which shifted the burden of collecting, sorting, recycling and disposing of packaging wastes away from taxpayers and on to manufacturers. Although judged by some to be successful and innovative, and adopted to some degree by several other countries, the Packaging Ordinance has not brought changes that directly cut waste. German manufacturers have simply swallowed the additional costs and continued to package goods as their counterparts do elsewhere.
It is an indication that while government intervention has a part to play, it cannot be regarded as solely responsible for managing waste. As Paterson appreciates, the public need to be won round. They don’t need to be preached at, but educated. They need to see that by their own actions they can improve their immediate environment and contribute to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Edinburgh, like the rest of Scotland, is involved in the National Waste Strategy, whose object is to recycle 25% of waste by 2006 and, in so doing, significantly lower the amount of waste being buried in landfill sites. In Lothian and Borders, for example, the average household produces a tonne of waste each year, 93% of which is buried in the ground. As a consequence of European Union directives, this proportion must be drastically altered.
Edinburgh’s preferred response is to make recycling more convenient. Wherever you go in the capital, there are black wheely bins, the bane of the New Town bourgeoisie, stationed at regular intervals between tenements. Undoubtedly aesthetically unpleasant, they allow householders to dump their rubbish when they want. “They bring cleaner streets,” says Paterson. “The downside is you have to look at them. But it’s better than seagulls and foxes ripping open bin bags.”
Householders are also encouraged to sift waste, putting aside paper and glass for recycling. Surveys have shown, says Paterson, that the public is keen to participate in recycling. It has to be made easy for them; the more obstacles that are put in their way, the less likely people are to respond positively. But it seems that message is slowly getting across, a perception confirmed by a trip to my nearest dump .
If you want to witness the extent to which we have adopted the creed of disposability, there is no better place to visit than the Seafield dump. Situated to the northeast of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, it is open seven days a week. Before 10am on a Sunday morning, cars are already beginning to queue, laden with unwanted stuff with which you could build and furnish a house if you are not too fussy. To here come bikes which have arrived at the end of their natural life because the air has gone out of a tyre. There are tables and chairs and standard lamps, sofas, sideboards and bookcases. The better preserved are saved and stored in a warehouse for donation to charities for the socially disadvantaged. The rest will soon be rendered useless, unceremoniously hoisted into concrete skips and crushed under the weight of accumulated rubbish. There are receptacles for shoes, clothes, paper, bottles, cans, concrete, white goods, chemicals, garden refuse and wood. There is no noxious smell and no mess. It is a far cry from the municipal dumps of old where the unsegregated rubbish was allowed to rot, open to the elements and the vermin, and the wind flung whatever it fancied wherever.
SIX mornings a week, 52 weeks a year, a train leaves Edinburgh and arrives two hours later on the outskirts of Dunbar in East Lothian. On board, in 39 sealed containers, is the bulk of the capital’s waste. Each container holds 13.5 tonnes of rubbish, which will be deposited into a 75 hectare landfill site, a former limestone quarry near the shores of the Firth of Forth. “Waste is like a river,” says John Paterson, “it keeps on coming and you can’t stop it”.
It is a Macbeth of a day. Rain falls foully and the wind makes a mockery of umbrellas. To the east, veiled in mist, lies Torness nuclear power station. Clive Barber, who runs the site on behalf of Viridor Waste Management, a private company, hands out hard hats and fluorescent jackets and we climb into a Land Rover. Passers-by would never know that nearby is a vast landfill site slowly filling up with the detritus of our daily lives. There is no nostril-nipping smell, no smoking pyres releasing deadly dioxins into the atmosphere, no mounds of miscellaneous rubbish. More eerily, there are few seagulls, although the creatures usually haunt such tips in their raucous legions.
Their absence, says Barber, can be explained by the presence of peregrine falcons which are used expressly to keep scavenging gulls away. Barber employs a bird handler to ensure that it stays like that. Rats, too, which were formerly attracted to the rich pickings of tips, are likewise less in evidence. The object these days is to bury the rubbish quickly before it can attract attention from verminous wildlife.
Ideally, says Paterson, we would have no more need for landfill sites, but the reality is that we do. With that in mind, the more closely regulated and managed they are the better. In recent decades, the legislation has become much tighter and the environment more strictly controlled. Thus the cost of landfill has risen considerably.
It is a price we have no option but to pay. Whatever we do, waste cannot be ignored. None of the methods of disposal is perfect. All we can do is minimise the effects, increase recycling and gradually phase out dumping. As Rogers writes: “The direct environmental impacts of garbage are sobering. Increased amounts of trash mean more collection trucks on the road spewing diesel exhaust into the atmosphere. Incinerators release toxins into the air and spawn ash that can contaminate soil and water. Landfills metastasise like cancer across the countryside, leaching their hazardous brew into the nearby ground water, unleashing untold environmental problems for future generations.”
The truth is that nobody knows fully what the long-term effects of landfill will be. The site at Dunbar will take 50 years to fill up; it will be another 30 before the land is properly reusable. As it is, tens of thousands of trees have already been planted and grass is growing on layer upon layer of waste. In the distant future a nature reserve is planned.
To prevent leaching, the rubbish is laid on a membrane (“like a very, very big plastic sack,” says Barber) which creates a vast underground bladder that is intended to prevent contamination of groundwater by collecting leachate – liquid wastes combined with the rainwater that seeps through buried rubbish – and diverting it to nearby water treatment facilities. Progress is monitored by computers. At sites where hazardous and toxic waste is dumped, contamination is inevitable and combustion a possibility.
At Dunbar, however, the bulk of what’s put into the ground is sifted beforehand in a huge warehouse. Here and only here does one catch the pungent, putrid smell of decay. “It’s about a week old,” says Paterson, savouring the aroma like a connoisseur might freshly brewed Colombian coffee. “It’s what we call ‘fresh waste’.” When I demur, he seems genuinely put out. “It’s actually a nice sweet smell,” he protests, “you do get used to it.” But who, given a choice, would want to?