The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

Whoever you speak to, in whichever corner of the waste industry, you are liable to come away with the impression that soft utopianism has taken the place of militant politics in contemporary Britain. Many of these people were born in the 1960s, which means they are not children of the 1960s – dreaming of toppling governments or teaching their uptight professors a lesson – so much as children of the 1980s, a generation all too aware of the limits of idealism. Even the Freegans, for all their hatred of corporations, take it for granted that greed is seen to be good, and their ambition is not to gather political forces but to replenish the spiritual motives of their generation. And those who have joined the establishment – the politicians, the civil servants, the lawyers – speak with energy about ethical improvements in the absence of any notion of revolution. They speak of potential and of broader choices. They speak of personhood and of lifestyle.

  Among these people the question of what to do with rubbish is not about ripping up the system, much more about fulfilling your personal goals, increasing the peace, opting for harmony. They don’t curse the world, they compliment it with kind acts, and their attitude to a non-recycler is rather like General William Booth’s attitude to drunks. The hardcore waste community does not hate its enemies, but feels sorry for them, and in every other thing it says appears to believe a new day is dawning.

  Though much slower and much less ambitious than the lobbyists would like, the government – which speaks of increasing recycling rates to 40 per cent by 2010, when Friends of the Earth wants 75 per cent by 2015 – has not dodged the bullet when it comes to enforcing penalties on big business to encourage better habits in the way it handles its rubbish. Defra recently commissioned a report from the AEA Energy and Environment Group, a private consultancy, that addresses the question of landfill and how to increase the tax on it. No British person giving an account of their life would think to mention landfill sites, but that is where most of the stuff in the average life ends up. All the bins in all our lives have gone to landfills or incinerators. We have never thought about it, and now that we are thinking about it, say the evangelists, we can never be the same.

  ‘Final disposal to landfill is considered the least attractive option in the waste hierarchy,’ says the report for Defra:

  The largely organic content of food industry wastes can contribute significantly towards the detrimental aspects of landfill (for example, as a source of methane emissions from anaerobic decomposition within the landfill). The EC Landfill Directive sets targets to reduce the amounts of biodegradable wastes (biodegradable municipal wastes) consigned to landfill – the first target has to be achieved by 2010 (for the UK).

  Where the amounts are not reduced, waste producers will be taxed to hell. The government recently announced the scale of this taxation, and it is good and punitive, with a medium to long-term rate of £35 per tonne. ‘This provides a very strong driver,’ says the report,

  to encourage businesses to take action to reduce their waste sent for landfill disposal. Most noticeably, the landfill tax escalator appears to have brought about an approximately 10 per cent reduction in the tonnages of standard rate waste landfilled in the two years between 2003–4 and 2005–6. This shows that a key policy, closely linked to reduction of waste disposal, is working.

  Calvert landfill site lies in the most beautiful part of Buckinghamshire, snug against a former brickworks. They say that there have been quarries here since the fifteenth century, when Londoners passed their rubbish to rakers, who dumped it in the Essex marshes. In later centuries people burned most of their combustible waste in domestic fires, and the dust was taken in carts to be sieved for use in brick making. Bottles were reused and plastic was a science fiction. The nineteenth century was the age of salvage, and Victorian Britain was a recycling nation by necessity: wood was redeployed and bone was ground down; ash was spread on the land, and the only things buried were bodies and vegetable matter. But by 1875, and the Public Health Act, the regulation of household waste had become a priority, dealt with by local authorities. The act stipulated that households maintain a ‘moveable receptacle’ for rubbish – the birth of the bin – and a charge was made for its removal.

  The 1930s saw the rise of non-biodegradable rubbish and warnings were issued against dumping. Yet rubbish tips surrounded most urban areas and were constantly on fire. After 1956, and the Clean Air Act, domestic bins began to fill up with paper and packaging (tied to the rise of marketing), and in the 1970s chemical and electrical waste became part of the picture. Overall, the move in domestic dustbins from dust and cinders to paper and plastics has taken a little over a hundred years and has changed the air we breathe.

  Calvert has been one of the country’s biggest landfill sites since it opened in the 1980s. April Jennings is a tough, science-educated woman in a man’s world, and nothing appears to bother her, not even the four inches of mud on her boots the day I went to see her. ‘It used to be a bit of a black art, the landfill site in the 1980s,’ she said, ‘but the science of it has improved and we know much more about it. We can recontour the old landfill sites and extend our years.’ She reckons the Calvert site may have about twenty-five years left. The great buzz-phrase in April’s world is ‘renewable energies’ – Tony Blair loved to hear himself say it – and the people at Calvert feel good about the electricity they are able to produce by harvesting the methane gas created by the buried rubbish on their site. ‘We have the capacity to produce seventeen megawatts,’ April said. ‘We can extract the last bit of value from what people throw away.’ She seems to shrug at the view (even the government’s view) that landfill is at the bottom of the hierarchy when it comes to ways of dealing with Britain’s rubbish. ‘Everything is checked,’ she says.

  Her colleague Peter Robinson chips in. ‘The whole area of waste handling and management is so much more technically sound in the UK than it ever was before.’ He smiles. ‘This country’s history of landfill has actually been quite safe; it has served us well.’ On the walls of the management offices at Calvert there are pictures of green fields and of tractors moving rubbish. ‘It’s all changing,’ Robinson said. ‘We’re moving from a “throw everything away” culture to one of preservation and recycling. In order to make it work there has to be a shift in how we manage our own waste and in how we handle the costs.’ I asked him if there was something alien to the British mind in the idea of making a fuss about what we throw away. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘People don’t have that understanding – but it’s coming in a big way. The UK is trying to do something in a handful of years that other member states in Europe have been doing for a long time.’

  Most of the waste at Calvert comes in overnight. There’s a railway beside the landfill and the large cranes and the ghost trains arrive in the dark with their loads of domestic rubbish from London and Bristol. Every day, five days a week, at least four trains a day, each train consisting on average of fifty containers, each holding fifteen tons of rubbish. ‘That’s a lot of rubbish,’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ April said. ‘We have two power stations running off this site. A third of the country’s renewable energy is coming from landfill.’ (The trouble is that only 3 per cent of the UK’s electricity comes from renewable energy sources.) We walked into the heart of the landfill area and April pointed to the trees on the horizon. ‘All the way to there,’ she said. The ground in between was landscaped and looked pretty much like any English scrubland, except that beneath the covering of vegetation there were hundreds of thousands of tons of suppurating English garbage. ‘It’s like an apple pie,’ she said, ‘with the clay as the base and the grass as the sugar.’ I wasn’t sure if this was the right image, conjuring a hot, sticky, unstable filling and a thin crust, but April said it was the best she had. Peter Robinson spoke of the ‘leachate’, the brown liquid that is drawn from the centre of all that old plastic and paper and general rubbish, the liquid being purified on-site and running out clear in a ditch at the end. I could also see pipes – there are 450 of them – dra
wing off gas that would be harnessed for electricity.

  We climbed a ridge of brown sludge to reach the summit. Looking down from there was like staring into a crater of the moon, except that the colossal indentation was filled with rubbish. The sky was very blue above the ridge of sludge and the carrier bags strewn in the mud. The crater was sixty metres deep and a murder of crows swooped above us, followed by seagulls. At the near edge it seemed there were Tesco bags as far as the horizon; I looked down and saw a bottle of children’s bubble mixture, a squashed box of Typhoo tea, a tin of Dulux paint, a Capri Sun fruit drink carton: the recent detritus of an average life, and in the distance there were more plastic bags trapped in the branches of a copse of trees and blowing in and out like struggling lungs. Something in the scale of the rubbish and the size of the canyon dizzied one’s nervous system: a metaphysical smack came with the sight of the layers of used-up stuff, like the feeling that comes when sixty thousand people shout at a football match or a when a million supplicants crowd into Mecca. April walked off and I stood on the ridge of the landfill surveying the scene. A dumped bath, a heap of carpet, a thousand empty bottles of orange squash, a hundred thousand legs of lamb, a million bottles of shampoo: it was all the stuff of life and it was all evidence of death.

  ‘There are four thousand landfills in the UK,’ April said, as we walked through the mud and the crows dived. ‘This will fill up eventually: landfill is a finite source of waste management.’ For a second I wondered if April had noticed the shock and awe on my face. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The best thing of all would be for us to stop making waste.’

  ‘Then you’ll be out of a job,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll just fall back on my chemistry.’ We both laughed and I saw a seagull (or an albatross) out of the corner of my eye diving to darkness on extended wings. A plastic radio was crushed in the mud against a box of unused Oxo cubes, and I fancied the bird had spotted the shiny paper and was seizing its opportunity. ‘We have a lot of pest control here at Calvert,’ April said. ‘You have to. We keep falcons. These seagulls are notoriously bad for carrying litter and dropping it out there.’ I looked over the trees to the place she called ‘out there’, the villages and commuter towns of Buckinghamshire, and beyond them the cities where people sleep soundly while a train carries away the stock cubes that they forgot to use and then just simply forgot.

  We have to believe that the litter of commodities melts into air, just as we do, or else we would have to live very differently in the world, much more consciously in company with the choices we make and the mess we create. Life without rubbish would mean living in a state of ethical awareness that might threaten pleasure – threaten commerce – while never releasing individuals from the facts of the past and the realities of death. We don’t admit it, but the idea of absence is a comfort to the present, for if nothing is away then everything is a deposit. If nothing is away, we are suddenly not dots on a linear track of time but in some sense are constituent with all that has been, or will be. That is not convenient, and it might explain why a real engagement with recycling can come to seem transcendental. It might leave people with the impression that there is more to one’s life than one’s life, and that impression is powering the mood of a generation. Throwing things away has been so essential to our sense of how to live that we forget we invented the process just to increase our pleasures.

  Like everything else – like health, like famine relief, like national security – the ethical impulse to minimise our waste must be rendered sensible in business terms before it can be understood to be practical in any other way. The liveliest new thinking in relation to rubbish is therefore about the great financial benefit recycling brings – there are profits to be had, and this is understood to be a motor of change. The concept was essentially invented by the Japanese, by companies such as Toshiba, who came up with a system of ‘total quality management’ whereby the manufacturing process would build in the possibility of zero defects. Many Japanese companies are now working on an understanding that their processes will suffer only one defect per million. ‘Transferred to the arena of municipal waste,’ said Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace,

  Zero Waste forces attention onto the whole life cycle of products. Zero Waste encompasses producer responsibility, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within a single framework. It breaks away from the inflexibility of incinerator-centred systems and offers a new policy framework capable of transforming current linear production and disposal processes into ‘smart’ systems that utilise the resources in municipal waste and generate jobs and wealth for local economies.

  At its most basic, this means that a company that aims to produce spoons will have made a plan, before they produce a single spoon, about how to source the metal ethically, how to transport it in vehicles with low carbon emissions, what to do with the metal shavings, how the water that cools the metal will be re-routed back into the system, and how the packaging will be reusable. Zero defects. Zero waste.

  Zero Waste may turn out to be one of the key concepts of the post-industrial era. It will change everything: it will change what you are doing now and will do in five minutes. Robin Murray of the London School of Economics has put the matter more purposefully than most. In Zero Waste, his 2002 report for Greenpeace, he peels our habits in relation to rubbish to the core. ‘Waste has been seen as the dark side,’ he writes,

  as that against which we define the good. It has been the untouchable in the caste system of commodities. The idea that waste could be useful, that it should come in from the cold and take its place at the table of the living, is one that goes far beyond the technical question of what possible use could be made of this or that. It challenges the whole way we think of things and their uses, about how we define ourselves and our status through commodities, by what we cast out as much as by what we keep in.

  If the notion of Zero Waste wasn’t so life-altering and revolutionary it would appear simply sensible. It relies on absolutely no discharge of toxic waste and no atmospheric damage, but it also means a new intolerance of material rubbish. From the Zero Waste point of view, a society in which a person drops a sandwich wrapper in the street would be as unthinkable as one where a person in the street pulled down their pants and shat. Everything would be understood to have an ongoing life. At its best, it amounts to a wholesale reconceptualising of our economic and moral worlds, bringing the idea of ‘away’ into the social sphere of ‘here’. Forgetting to do the right thing with an ice-lolly stick might come to be like forgetting not to kick a dog. (Street cleaners in this country presently clear away half a million tons of rubbish every year.) You would do it automatically because that is what you do, sensing, as a form of knowledge, as a categorical imperative as opposed to a species of choice, that nothing in the world is rubbish. Our focus, then, Murray argues, would be on the material life cycle, in which it should become natural for materials to live and transform and live again. ‘From cradle to cradle,’ he writes, ‘rather than from cradle to grave.’

  A recent issue of Resource magazine ran a list of the ‘Hot 100 Agents of Change’ in the waste debate. Standing at number 28 – one above new entrant David Miliband, the environment secretary – is a man called Andy Moore, who is head of the Community Recycling Network. The first time I met him, in the bar at Paddington station, he seemed weary but refreshingly non-morose when it came to talking about rubbish. He gives the impression of having spoken to everybody and thought of everything: he gave me a head start on some of the trends, and then, several weeks later, I travelled to Bristol to see him in his element.

  At the Prince of Wales pub on Gloucester Road, everybody was drinking either Weston’s organic cider or organic real ale. Andy had the latter and he spares no ire on the waste companies. I asked him what his first memory of rubbish was and he spoke about an incinerator that used to exist in Chapman Street in Hull. ‘I was eight,’ he said, ‘but what I remember was a big warehouse with a concrete floor. In the middle was the
most massive hole and I knew there was a fire burning underneath. It was a horrible place, owned by the Cleansing Department.’ He also remembers the rag-and-bone man, who went through the streets shouting two syllables: ‘ra’ bo’.’ He took a sip from his pint and smiled over the glass. ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass,’ he said. ‘That’s an old Yorkshire expression. We’re all Gypsies when it comes to it, looking after the bins. It’s how we used to think. “Sovereignty,” Georges Bataille wrote, “is the freedom to waste.” At festivals, at Christmas, and every day, we waste, we give things away, that is what seemed normal to us.’

  The area around the waterway in Bristol has been reinvented. The architects have had a field day, and you detect, thereabouts, the flurry of design competitions and the late-night glow of Anglepoise lamps. People have worked hard to make the place modern, to overcome a possible downturn in West Country parts and labour, but you couldn’t say the results made it the most soulful place on earth. There’s plenty of life around, though, and later that night Andy Moore gathered a few of his waste-industry honchos at a restaurant sited in a former Bristol fire station. Mal Williams is great company, a round, avuncular man who lives in Wales; Iain Gulland is Scottish and quieter, though not for long. He studied ecology at the University of St Andrews. Each of the men likes a drink and is bound by a sense of social justice tailored to new realities.

  ‘Are they going to do it?’ I asked. ‘Is the public going to get into the business of changing its character?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Andy. ‘And business is the right word.’

  Mal looked through the candles and the organic wine. ‘The old paradigm was “out of sight, out of mind,” but the new message is more like “you create this waste, you can stop it”. We are all defining a new kind of industry now.’ He made it clear – they all did – that they don’t believe it will be the waste companies who lead the way. The waste companies, they say, have changed for the better but they still have an old-fashioned view of how to profit from rubbish. Bury or burn is the philosophy, and that won’t do any longer because the rest of the world isn’t having it.