As an offshoot of the recent discussion about banning plastic bags: I did a survey of environmental rubbish in Bowral over a period of one and a half hours. July 2018.
Overview.
The most obvious thing about manmade rubbish in Bowral is how little there is. As an eyesore it’s completely overshadowed by poor maintenance. As a number of objects on the ground it’s completely overshadowed by tree leaves, tree bark and even bird droppings.
The second most obvious thing about manmade rubbish in Bowral, is that it’s dominated by cigarette butts, both in number of objects and in total volume of waste.
The third most obvious thing is the enormous variety, almost all rubbish items are unique.
The only manmade rubbish items that were not unique are the following.
Cigarette butts – several hundred
Dried chewing gum – several dozen
21 supermarket receipts
6 metal drink cans
4 tissues
4 fragments of thick cardboard
4 yellow supermarket price lables
3 plastic stirrers
3 metal beer bottle tops
3 parts of clothes hangers
3 barcodes
3 free magazines
3 cling wrap
2 gum wrappers
2 broken glass bottles
2 business cards
2 rubber bands
2 drink coasters
2 paper McCafe cups
2 paper bags
On top of that, 96 unique items, including one of the thin supermarket plastic bags.
By material of construction, excluding cigarette butts and dried chewing gum.
More paper than plastic.
More plastic than metal.
More metal than food scraps.
More food scraps than clothing.
More clothing than broken glass.
More fragments of objects than whole objects.
Objects that looked whole, in good condition, and still useful included:
Beanie, comb, blue plastic bowl, green style bag.
More general plastic categories by origin:
Thin wrappers for snacks (chocolate, lolly, muesli bar, biscuit). 7
Coffee shop 5
Hardware shop or building products 5
Clothing shop 3
Energy drink or bottled water 3
Supermarket packaging 2
Technology packaging 2
Medical 2
Alcohol packaging 1
Ziploc bag 1
Asian take away 1
Straw 1
Advertising sign 1
Name badge holder 1
Pen fragment 1
Lost comb 1
Toy fragment 1
Battery part 1
Plastic crockery 1
Party packaging 1
Plastic jewellery 1
On the topic of recycling, there was not one recycling symbol that I saw on any piece of rubbish in this survey. After the survey finished I saw two.
Non-plastics that could deserve attention
Tissues, serviettes, wet wipes 7
Handouts including free newspaper, flier, business card 7
Sticky stuff includes label, nutrition label, barcode, name tag, band-aid, stick-on heart 8
I saw two “dumping grounds” where perhaps as few as one person had dumped rubbish over months or years, one as part of the survey and one later.
Summary
- Supermarkets come out of this quite well, except for paper receipts
- Recycling symbols are working. Adding recycling symbols to more products (paper, cans, hardware plastic etc.) would help
- Something ought to be done about cigarette butts and chewing gun – but what?
- Thin shopping bags with handles are a very small part of rubbish here
- If an object is small then it’s going to end up as environmental rubbish
- Add a bin in the middle of each “dumping ground”.
Humour?
For the last 50 years, an infamous component of environmental rubbish has been the laceless left hand leather boot. There’s even been a song about it. Driving north past Albury guess what I saw? An abandoned laceless left hand leather boot. Later, driving south hundreds of km further on I saw a laceless right hand leather boot.
