Have you ever thought about the amount of waste you’ve generated as just one person? That – chances are – a lot of the things you’ve ever thrown away are still out there somewhere? When you think about that at a global level, it’s overwhelming, literally and figuratively.
According to global waste statistics, the world generates approximately 2 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste annually. This is expected to rise to 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050, more than double the projected population growth over the same period.
As we mark Global Recycling Day, we believe we need to urgently move beyond our dependence on recycling and embrace a truly circular economy, at both the national and individual level.
The inconvenient truth
Every day in Ireland, we generate a staggering 8kg of waste per person – that’s nearly three tonnes annually for each of us, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest figures.
While many of us dutifully separate our waste and place it in the appropriate bins, feeling we’ve done our part, the reality is far more complex
Despite our good intentions, Ireland’s recycling rate has remained stagnant at 41% for a decade, falling well short of the EU’s 55% target for 2025. A recent audit by Repak found that while 88% of Irish people believe they’re doing a great job with recycling, only 53% can accurately identify what can actually be recycled.
But perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is what happens to our waste after it leaves our shores. We assume what we put in the recycling bin will be recycled – how or where isn’t something that enters our minds.
In reality, it may just have embarked on a carbon-spewing journey to communities thousands of miles away.
Garbage imperialism
“For us, rubbish is gold.” So said a Naples mafioso in 2008, as reported by Alexander Clapp in his exploration of global waste trade “Waste Wars: The Wild Life of Your Trash”.
In the late 1980s, as Clapp documents, “thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America” – a practice that Daniel Arap Moi, then president of Kenya, called garbage imperialism.
Despite subsequent international agreements to prevent such practices, our waste continues to flow to poorer nations. In Ghana, communities of ‘burner boys’ make cents per hour torching Western electronic waste, often coughing up blood at night.
In Turkey, marine biologists fly drones along the Mediterranean coast searching for stray piles of European plastic waste, which enters the country “at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes”.
Even more alarmingly, in Indonesia, Western waste – from Californian toothpaste tubes to Dutch shopping bags – is stacked knee-high in the highlands of Java and used as fuel in bakeries supplying local markets.
The result, as Clapp puts it, is “some of the most lethal cuisine imaginable, with poisons from incinerated Western plastic ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians”.
Beyond the Three Rs: reducing our consumption
This Global Recycling Day, we need to remember that the sustainability mantra has evolved. Where we used to focus on the Three Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), the EPA now emphasises Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
As Celine Horner of the EPA explains:
“We should be consuming less, buying less, producing less waste – [think about] what goes into the generation of a plastic bottle made from oil: the oil is transported, the oil is processed, the bottle is produced, used for 10 seconds, binned, and then transported again, goes out for recycling – it’s got a very short lifespan where it’s actually in use, but its environmental impact goes much further than that.”
Our culture of convenience has already swamped parts of the world with waste and environmental degradation, and if we don’t rapidly rethink how we consume, it will overwhelm us even further.
Practical steps to make a difference
Rethink first
- – Ask yourself: “Do I really need this?” Wanting something and needing it are not the same.
- – Think about where products come from and where they’ll ultimately end up and consider the full lifecycle impact of products before purchasing.
- – Question whether you’re replacing items because they’re worn out or just because you feel like it.
Repair next
- – Check repairmystuff.ie to find local repair services for clothes, appliances, and furniture.
- – Learn basic mending skills to extend the life of your possessions.
- – Support the right to repair movement and businesses that make repairable products.
Reuse when possible
- – Borrow or rent items you’ll only use occasionally and share resources with neighbours and friends. Take a look at reversethetrend.ie for resources on how you can rewear and share clothes.
- – Buy second-hand through community networks, charity shops, auction houses and online platforms like Vinted, Facebook Marketplace, and Done Deal. Support organizations like Community Resources Network Ireland and the Rediscovery Centre.
- – Repurpose existing items where possible.
Buy to last
- – Invest in quality items that will endure, and that can be repaired or recycled at end-of-life
- – Choose products with minimal packaging.
- – Avoid items containing hazardous chemicals.
Recycle as a last resort (but do it right)
- – Follow the clean, dry, loose rule for all recycling.
- – Learn what your local facility actually accepts at mywaste.ie.
- – Understand the importance of separating material streams to make recycling economically viable and check packaging symbols to ensure items can be recycled.
Moving forward together
Warren Phelan from the EPA’s Circular Economy Programme emphasises that –
“deeper change is needed right across the economy to accelerate the transition to a more circular economy. Effective regulation, incentives and enforcement are required to influence businesses and consumers to adopt best practices in production, supply, purchasing, use and reuse of goods, products and services.”
This sentiment is echoed in the Joint Committee on Environment & Climate Action’s recent Report on the Circular Economy, which highlights that Ireland’s circularity rate is just 2%, making it among the lowest in Europe and well below the EU average of 11.5%.
The report makes 47 recommendations for boosting circularity, including developing sectoral compacts across key industries, embedding circular principles in public procurement, and establishing a qualification in resource management.
Most crucially, the report emphasises that we should not think of the circular challenge as how we manage waste, but rather as ‘rethinking how we meet our needs in a way that has fewer adverse impacts and which designs out waste’ from the start.
It requires a reframing of the problem, and a concerted cross-departmental effort to implement a radically different approach to solving it.
As consumers, our choices matter, and one of our most powerful weapons is where we put our purchasing power. But systemic change requires action at all levels – from government policy to business practices to individual habits.
This Global Recycling Day, let’s commit to moving beyond simply recycling and embrace the full hierarchy of rethink, reduce, reuse, and only then, recycle.
As Yeo Bee Yin, former environmental minister of Malaysia, starkly put it, the only way to really stop waste from entering her country would be to close their ports entirely.
A better way is to create less waste in the first place.
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Images by M-CO for reversethetrend.ie, an initiative of the Department of the Environment, Climate, and Communications.
Sources: Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland; Repak; “Waste Wars: The Wild Life of Your Trash” by Alexander Clapp; RTÉ Brainstorm article by Aoife Ryan-Christensen; Open Knowledge Repository; Development Aid; Joint Committee on Environment & Climate Action Report on the Circular Economy