REAL LIFE IS WEIRD! Did you know that frogs are cannibals, fashion can be fatal and the dinosaurs never died? Or that redheads were once burned at the stake as witches? How about walking fish and talking eggs? Find out what all the fuss is about. Collect the set of It’s True! books and tantalise your friends with startling stories and far-out facts. Coming soon: titles on THE SUPERNATURAL, SPACE, SPIES, POISONS, ANTARCTICA, BONES, JOKES, BUSHRANGERS
First published in 2005 Copyright © text Deborah Burnside 2005 Copyright © illustrations Andrew Plant 2005 Series design copyright © Ruth Grüner All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Burnside, Deborah, 1969– . It’s true! this book is a load of rubbish. Includes index. For children. ISBN 1 74114 624 0. 1. Refuse and refuse disposal – Juvenile literature. 2. Recycling (Waste, etc.) – Juvenile literature. I. Plant, Andrew. II. Title. 363.728 Series, cover and text design by Ruth Grüner Cover photographs: Getty Images and Alan Kearney (landfill) and Arthur S. Aubry (man in protective suit) Set in 12.5pt Minion by Ruth Grüner Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Teaching notes for the It’s True! series are available on the website: www.itstrue.com.au
Contents WHY RUBBISH?
1 GLAMOROUS GARBAGE 1
2 THE HURDLE OF THE HEAP 10
3 THE THREE Rs OF RUBBISH 22
4 DOWN THE DRAIN 35
5 DIGGING UP THE REAL DIRT 48
6 PLASTIC FANTASTIC? 62
7 SPACE JU N K AND ODD SOCKS 75 Thanks 85 Glossary 86 Where to find out more 87 Index 88
Why Rubbish? Do you ever think ‘I’d really like to run a wheeliebin business when I grow up?’ I didn’t either, but that’s what I took up as a career. I love it, too (it’s true!). Maybe it goes back to childhood trips to the dump with Dad. We fossicked around and found furniture to fix, boxes of comics and all sorts of stuff that Mum wished we hadn’t. Some of what I know about rubbish is in this book, as well as a whole heap of stuff that I’d never imagined. Come dump-digging with me and find out which rubbish is trendy, what happens to waste in space and why one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
1 GLAMOROUS GARBAGE Who says garbage isn’t glamorous? Garbage turns up in paintings and sculptures, music, books and movies, as well as in royal coronations and on Mount Everest. Even the FBI and the Mafia (shhh) are keenly interested in rubbish. It’s true!
Celebrity leftovers Frenchmen Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron have been rummaging through rubbish for 15 years. Not any old rubbish, though – they specialise in trash cans 1
belonging to the likes of John Travolta and Tom Cruise. Wearing their rubber gloves, the two men root around to find interesting objects, then lay them out on a black velvet background and take a photograph. They sell the photographs for over $7000. That’s true Trash to Treasure. It’s not illegal, as long as the bin is on the footpath before they start rummaging.
God save the Queen . . . hic! The day after Elizabeth Windsor was crowned Queen of England in 1953, workers at the Westminster City Council removed over 112 tonnes of rubbish from London streets. During the Golden Jubilee celebrations 50 years later, street cleaners worked through the night and removed 100 tonnes of rubbish, including 50 000 empty champagne bottles, before staggering off to bed. Strewth. 2
It’s in the bin, Inspector In the 1970s, a journalist from the Washington Post, Jack Anderson, figured that if the police and FBI could fossick about in trash cans without a warrant, then so could he. To make the point, he chose to investigate the trash can of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI.1 He found empty whisky bottles, dog doo-doo and not much else. If police want to get a search warrant to search someone’s house, they can’t just say ‘But I know that they did it, your Honour’ – that’s not enough. So US police often go searching through garbage to find evidence of criminal behaviour. If they find what they’re looking for, a warrant can be granted. Too bad for the bad guys then. They should have recycled.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency that investigates crimes against Federal (national) law. Its job is also ‘to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats’. 1
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Garbage on screen How many times have you seen a movie in which someone escapes by flinging themselves from an open window . . . to land in a bin conveniently full of soft rubbish? What about that other trusty escape route, the garbage chute? In movies and TV shows, you’ll see rubbish trucks blocking alleys. Or bins being scattered in high-speed car chases or pushed in the way of the ‘bad guys’ to slow them down. In Showtime, a rubbish truck is the getaway vehicle. In crime films, you’ll often see evidence discovered in the office wastepaper basket. Bodies, cars, priceless jewels and other items are often glimpsed disappearing into compaction equipment or the backs of trucks. Basically, if some kind of waste disposal equipment doesn’t appear in the first 10–15 minutes, then the movie is probably no good! 4
Trash flashback The Mad Max films showed what might happen if we used up almost all the planet’s fuel reserves. A city was built from salvaged junk, and methane gas was produced from pigs’ poop to provide fuel. All of the vehicles, weapons and other contraptions were made out of recycled junk, except Mel Gibson’s car, a 1973 Ford Falcon. I wonder if it’s been recycled yet? Mel Gibson was so unknown at the time that he didn’t feature on ads for the movie. He shouldn’t feel bad, though. Even Marilyn Monroe has her famous Andy Warhol image on a wastepaper bin. I trash you not.
Pet pig Max, George Clooney’s pot-bellied pig-pal, lives like a pig in muck – he’s even allowed to sleep in George’s bedroom. George loves his pig. Max the pig loves him, which is strange since George gave Max the pig to his girlfriend Kelly Preston as a present in1988. 5
Kelly didn’t love Max the pig, though, and George didn’t love his friend Tommy Hinkley when he ran over Max by accident and broke Max’s leg. Max might have stayed with George to gobble his garbage, but I think he might be a spoilt pig who guzzles only gourmet grub. What do you think?
Climb every mountain – but don’t toss your trash The saying ‘What goes up must come down’ isn’t always true. Over 1000 climbers from 60 countries around the world have had a crack at Mount Everest. (The first to get to the top was Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand mountaineer, in 1953.) The ones who survive and come down again often discard all unnecessary items to lighten their load, making the mountain the highest dust-heap in the world. Even though Nepal has strict rules about leaving rubbish, Everest is littered with oxygen bottles, ropes, tents and general rubbish, as well as the bodies of people who’ve died trying to tramp to the top. 6
Ken Noguchi from Japan and a team of climbers and guides aim to clean up South Col. This is the last camp before the summit, where huge amounts of junk lie about. Cleaning up Everest is not new to climber Ken. He has twice brought down tonnes of trash and displayed it to show people the pollution problem on the mountain.
Glad rags and bags Around the world, fashion shows and events turn rubbish and recyclables into wearable art. For almost 10 years the Waitakare City Council has supported the Trash to Fashion® event, and there is a section for young designers aged from 11 years onwards. I’ve been lucky enough to judge a competition like 7
this in my home town, and saw amazing outfits made out of bicycle parts, used camera film, empty nutshells and good old plastic bread bags. It gave a whole new meaning to the saying ‘Get your glad rags on’. To find out about it, log on to www.trashtofashion.com and start stockpiling your bits and pieces to make a trendy trashion statement. If you have no idea where Waitakare is, then check out your local council to see if they have similar events. They’ll have the scoop on stitching the scrap . . . and that’s a wrap.
No fiction about this kitchen! Have you ever watched the English TV program Changing Rooms? One of the designers, Oliver Heath, 8
has built an entire kitchen from recycled, reclaimed or re-used materials. Very funky. Everything worked, and best of all it looked good! I wonder if he included a recycling bin.
Pssst . . . In the late 1800s and early 1900s, new immigrants to America – many of them Italians and Jews – were involved in the garbage business. They collected trash, sold scrap, recycled rags and shovelled you know what. The Mafia were also involved, though not all their business dealings were ‘clean’. Newspaper reports say the Italian Mafia controls 30 per cent of the rubbish industry in Italy. That’s probably not true – you can’t always believe what you read in the papers, or the court reports . . . and the idea for The Sopranos is probably completely made up, because writers do make things up sometimes, but of course not in this book.
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2 THE HURDLE OF THE HEAP Question: What’s the odd one out in this list, and why? N garbo
N dustman
N tosher
N raker
N mudlark
N tosser
By the end of this chapter, you’ll know the answer, but I’ll give you a clue. It’s not ‘tosher’. Actually, it’s ‘tosser’ – but you still won’t know why until you’ve read on. All of us are tossers, and we always have been, throughout history. Our long-ago ancestors 10
(the hunting, fishing, picking-berries kind) threw away broken tools, food scraps and animal bones. Aborigines and Maori ate shellfish and tossed the shells on the ground.2 At some point, people realised that home would be much nicer – no smell, no rats, yay! – if they took the rubbish away from where they lived.
Take it to the dump The earliest rubbish dump that we know about was over 2500 years ago in Athens. Athenians had to dump their waste at least 11⁄2 kilometres (a mile) outside the city walls. Now, thousands of years later, the bones and shells are dug up and studied by archaeologists, the real dump-diggers, but that’s another story. 2
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Europeans in the Middle Ages weren’t so sensible. For example, Londoners tossed their food scraps and other trash into the streets. They also emptied their chamber pots out the window.
TRASH FACT Gentlemen used to walk on the street side while escorting ladies, in case the contents of a chamber pot came flying out of a window.
If they were feeling kind, they’d shout ‘Gardy loo!’ before they did it, so the people under their window had time to get out of the way. Passers-by picked their way between rotting cabbages, bones, people poo – and animal poo as well. The city was like a zoo, filled with horses, pigs, dogs and cats, all doing their business in the streets. Eeuw pooh!
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Around 1300 the Mayor of London said, ‘Enough is enough, there’s to be no more rubbish thrown out into the street’ (although he probably used 1300s-type words). Londoners took absolutely no notice for 50 years or so, until . . . the Plague!3 Well, hello, this made everybody sit up and take notice – the ones who were left, anyway, because the Plague of 1348 wiped out two-thirds of the people in the city. Imagine that. Official notices and proclamations were sent out, and then rakers were introduced in the 1400s. Rakers were people who raked up the rubbish and loaded it on boats to take to pits outside the city. The River Thames was tidal and when the tide was out, people called mudlarks would poke through the mud with a stick, searching for things that might be sold or re-used. Some mudlarks were only six years old.
A disease spread to people from the fleas of rats. It was very infectious and quickly caused death. The Plague appeared throughout Europe at different times in history. 3
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PIGS RULE Pigs eat anything, including poo. They’ve been used on farms to eat up kitchen scraps (and then provide the family’s bacon) for centuries. English people also used to let pigs loose in city streets to eat waste. In the USA, too, pigs were allowed to eat rubbish, right up till 1860, when the people of Washington DC still dumped their garbage and slops out in the street. Later, an outbreak of disease in piggeries meant that thousands of pigs had to be slaughtered. Laws were then passed that rubbish must be cooked before being fed to pigs. Experts say that your average pig can chew through 13 kilograms of rubbish per day. Would you like fries with that?
My old man’s a dustman You may think a dustman is the same as a garbo, but dustmen really did collect dust. In the 1900s, tonnes of coal were burned every year in English cities. The dustman called by with his horse and cart to collect the household’s dust and cinders. They took the collected dust and rubbish to their own dustyards, where pigs and hens picked over the pile searching for vegie scraps. The rest of the heap was sieved by workers (men, women and children), and sorted into the following: Soil the finest dust was sold to brickmakers as well
as to farmers to mix with manure for fertiliser Cinders, or ‘brieze’ also sold to brickmakers for
re-burning in the brick furnaces Rags, bones and old metal sold to boatyards and
marine suppliers Old tin and iron objects melted down and re-used Bits of bricks and oyster shells sold to builders to use
in house foundations and road-making 15
Worn-out boots and shoes sold to Prussian Blue
manufacturers (ask your art teacher what Prussian Blue is) Jewellery, money and coins well, what do you think
they did with them? The dustmen were similar to mudlarks, purefinders, toshers and rivermen – not that the dustmen would admit it. The ‘purefinder’ was a person who collected dog droppings in the city and then sold them by the bucket to tanneries, to be used in the process of turning animal skins into leather. If you think that collecting dog dung is a disgusting way of making a living, pity the toshers. They worked in the sewers of London, hunting for anything that might have fallen in by mistake. Rivermen? They fished dead bodies out of the Thames into their flat-bottomed boats, checked for jewellery and other things to sell, and pushed the bodies back in.
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These days we’ve gone back to the ancient Greeks’ way of handling rubbish. We take it outside the city, to dumps (sometimes called tips) or landfills.
Down with dumps The problem with dumps is that the decaying rubbish is left uncovered. It smells, and it isn’t healthy (remember the Plague). It also takes up a lot of space. Today the dump is almost dead in the Western world. Instead we have ‘transfer stations’ where waste is sorted for recycling or re-use. Anything that can’t be used is then carted to ‘sanitary landfills’. True to their name, these landfills are clean and tidy places, and there are no interesting piles of muck about any more.
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TRASH FACT In poor countries like Tanzania, children as young as four and five rummage in the dumps for lumps of coal to sell, just like the mudlarks, toshers and dustmen of London long ago.
Lovely landfill lasagne Most waste is compacted (squeezed to make it smaller) by the truck that collects it. At the landfill, it is spread out by bulldozers and loaders and squashed some more by a huge vehicle called (surprise) a ‘compactor’. This squeezes almost all the air and moisture out. Air not only takes up valuable space, it also makes a landfill unstable – the soil on top can subside. Then, like a huge rubbish lasagne, layers of rubbish and earth are laid down over a special plastic liner. The plastic and the clay beneath it stop any poisons from the rubbish getting into the soil or groundwater. The layers are compacted more and more until the landfill is full and then it’s capped off with a final layer of soil. As the rubbish decays it gives off a gas called methane. This gas can be collected and turned into energy. The largest landfill on Earth is Fresh Kills, which opened in 1948 on Staten Island, New York. It covers 2200 acres (as big as 300 Sydney Stadiums). 18
Fresh Kills received waste from the city for 50 years before it was closed. It re-opened briefly after the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 to receive dust and debris from the site. Fresh Kills has the highest man-made hill on the east coast of America. It’s 70 metres (75 yards) high . . . that is a BI-I-IG heap of rubbish!
‘Good-as-new’ rubbish In Australia, 1970s newspapers have been dug up, fully intact and readable! How does this happen? Well, the bacteria that cause decay can’t survive when they’ve been squashed flat in a landfill in the dark and dirt. Without air or moisture, rotting occurs so slowly that rubbish remains pretty much the same as the day it was 19
THE LAYERS IN LANDFILL
The plastic liner keeps waste from getting into the surrounding soil The collection pipe takes away stormwater and leachate (moisture that seeps out from the rubbish after it’s been compacted) The geotextile mat stops the gravel puncturing the liner Cells are the areas of compacted rubbish covered in soil
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thrown away. In the USA, 15-year-old hotdogs, whole heads of lettuce and even ancient cobs of corn have been unearthed. Want a snack, anyone? Landfills are a storage system only. Eventually they are capped off with soil and planted with shallowrooted trees and shrubs. Sometimes they need monitoring long after they have been filled and sealed, to make sure no gases or contaminants are escaping into the air or groundwater. But often the landfill becomes a golf course or recreation area. Nobody would know that waste was buried below. We need our landfills to be near where we live, but it can be a problem to find a suitable site close to big cities. Meanwhile, we just keep on producing more rubbish. In New York City today, the garbage bags can pile up as high as the first storey of the buildings. The bags are removed during the night and the streets are steam-cleaned before the sun comes up and rubbish production begins all over again. One solution to the hurdle of the heap is to reduce what we produce. We’ll get onto that in chapter 3. 21
3 THE THREE Rs OF RUBBISH Yes, I know, ‘rubbish’ has only one R. The three Rs I’m thinking of are: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. What do they mean? Rrread on . . . REDUCE = lessen the amount of rubbish we produce
(buy less, and throw out less) RE-USE = use something again, exactly as it is (maybe
after washing!) RECYCLE = melt down or process in a factory to make
new substances
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Gold medal for the Dutch People in the Netherlands are champion recyclers and re-users. They have to be, because their country is very small and most of it is below sea level. This means space for landfill is scarce, and if you dug a big hole it would soon become a swimming pool. The Dutch re-use or recycle almost everything – computers, tyres, plastic
FISHY TRASH FACT No. 1 painted wood, batteries, oil, Waste fish oil from a fish mobile phones, paper, glass, called orange roughy is steel. Soil is cleaned and used used to make perfume. furniture, plain wood,
again, and even the matting
FISHY TRASH FACT No. 2 (the national flower) is lifted, All the guts and gore cleaned, rolled and stored left over from dead fish for re-use. Other rubbish is can be combined with incinerated and the ash bark and wood pulp and is used to build roads. recycled as fertiliser . . . The tiny amount of rubbish but if you spread it on your that’s left goes to landfill. potato patch, you won’t grow fish and chips. used underneath tulip bulbs
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NEWSPAPER CHALLENGE Everyone knows about recycling paper, but not everybody knows that paper and especially newspaper still take up a huge amount of space in landfills. How many ways of reducing or re-using newsprint can you come up with? Here are a few to get you started. My favourites all involve birthday parties. Use newspapers for ‘pass the parcel’ wrap.
* Cut thin strips of newspaper and make them into a pom-pom to use as a decoration on a gift.
* Play this game. Each person rolls up a whole
newspaper really tightly and tapes it into a tube. Then everyone ties a blown-up balloon to their ankle with a piece of string and chases each other around, beating the other balloons with their tube. You’re the winner if you manage to pop everyone else’s balloon before they pop yours.
* Use the same beaters for a piñata. After the party, you can put the torn paper into a compost heap or worm farm. It can also be compacted into ‘bricks’ to start your fire, or shredded in glue-gloop for papier mâché. To reduce your papers, tell Mum and Dad to read their favourite daily on the Internet.
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Loop da loop Recycling is represented by this symbol, called a Möbius loop.4
r
The first arrow is for the collection of materials for recycling, from your footpath or at a recycling centre. The second arrow is for the processing that allows the materials to be turned into something else. The third arrow is for the purchase and use of the new product. The three arrows form a continuous loop. WARNING: anyone can put the loop on their label.
It doesn’t mean the product has been totally or partly recycled. The only way you can tell it’s recycled or recyclable is by becoming a symbol sleuth, which you can find out more about in chapter 6. Can a piece of paper have only one side? Möbius said yes. Does that mean that we only throw out half the paper we think we do? Maybe . . . Find out how to make your own Möbius loop by going to http://www.dpgraph.com/janine/mathpage/ handson.html. 4
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Going bananas: the trash test Have you ever heard of someone going bananas? Maybe it was a landfill owner who’d run out of space. The average person in the UK throws away about 74 kilograms (160 pounds) of organic waste every year.5 That’s equal to 1077 banana skins. Australians create even more waste. The total amount per person per year (organic and inorganic combined) would equal more than half a tonne of banana skins. How many is that? Too many to count. About a heaped trailerful. If you think I’m bananas, take the trash test. Tip all the stuff in your wheeliebin onto a large piece of newspaper. Sort the rubbish into piles of glass, plastic, packaging, organic waste including garden waste, plain paper, glossy paper, meat, cheese, wood,
‘Organic’ means made from plants or animals, including microscopic ones – anything that was once alive. 5
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batteries, oils, bottles, tins, aluminium cans, etc . . . Decide how much is ‘recyclable’ or ‘re-usable’ once washed. If you can set aside less than a half, then you must be recycling quite a bit already. That means you’re a true trash terminator. If you have lots of piles left, then you can do more to reduce your rubbish output! If you have lots of piles left, I bet most of them are organic waste – things like food scraps, including teabags, tea-leaves, coffee grounds, eggshells, bones used paper – napkins, paper towels, newspapers sawdust or vacuum-cleaner dust and garden stuff – grass clippings, leaves, pine needles, weeds, branches, twigs Almost all of it could go into the compost heap or a worm farm, and afterwards onto your garden.
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GOING BANANAS WITH NUMBERS Take your trash test further and find out your yearly banana-skin total. Weigh the Real Rubbish (the pile of stuff you can’t re-use or recycle). Divide by the number of people in your house to get amount of rubbish per person. Multiply that by 52 weeks (if it took a week to fill your wheeliebin). The answer is the total number of kilograms (or pounds) you produce each year of rubbish. The banana skin conversion is simple. Multiply the weight of your annual waste by 0.068 to get the number of banana skins your waste is worth!
Compost fit for a king To make compost, you put all your fruit and vegie leftovers into a bin or storage area, and then you let oxygen, bugs and time do their thing. You can add smaller garden bits too. Here’s how to do it. Have a container in the kitchen to put the food scraps in (one with a lid is best). Make sure everyone in the family knows to use it. Set up a large bin in the back yard, out of the way. Or you and your mum or dad could build three walls out of old bricks or plywood as a home for your heap. Make sure it is downwind of your deck. Put some soil into your bin or heap early on – it contains micro-organisms (tiny, tiny bugs) that are the real heroes of the heap.
Keep layering your indoor organic scraps with garden waste and a few grass clippings. Add water or wet waste if it looks dry or doesn’t seem to be heating up. If you live in an apartment, ask the building manager if there’s somewhere suitable for a heap. Your compost could be used on the surrounding gardens.
TRASH FACT While all that bug breakdown is taking place, the temperature in the heap can be anything up to 65 degrees Celsius. Steamy!
TIP: For quicker results,
turn the heap every day with a garden fork – this is called active composting, or hot-composting. It helps to get air through the heap, and that means the bugs breed faster. The more they breed, the more they eat and the more heat is in the heap.
IS IT READY? Compost can be ready in a couple of months or not for a year, depending how you manage your heap. It’s ready when it looks like earth (or potting mix), smells like soil, and crumbles in your fingers. It should be dark, rich and crumbly, like chocolate cake – mmmm.
COMPOST KILLJOYS You’ll cause a real stink if you add pet litter
too many grass clippings
meat and dairy products You’ll kill the good bugs if you add pesticide-treated timber
ash
glossy
brochures (the inks kill the micro-organisms) And it just ain’t smart to add weeds (d’oh, the finished compost will go on the garden, nobody wants weed seeds there) fibrous plants such as flaxes because they take too long to break down. 31
WHAT DO YOU DO WITH IT? Most likely your parents will want it for the garden, but you could give it away to someone else, or even bag it up to sell as a school fundraiser or for your own pocket money. People say ‘There’s money in muck’, and you might be able to rake some in for yourself, selling compost when all your materials are free!
A burning question You might be thinking ‘Why not burn the lot? Why don’t we put everything into an incinerator and get rid of it that way?’ Great idea. Burning rubbish in an incinerator reduces it to a tenth the size (and less than half the weight) of what you began with. But there’s a catch. The people of Nottingham in England tried it. In 1874 they built a big incinerator called the ‘Destructor’. About 250 more Destructors were built over the next 30 years. Destructors produced steam to generate electricity, but they also spewed out smoke, ash, dust and charred paper. People living 32
WORM WONDERLAND A worm farm is another method of cold-composting your organic kitchen scraps. You can buy special worm farm containers, or make your own by stacking boxes with holes between the top and bottom layer so the worms can move up when you take away the castings (worm poo, which is rather like compost) from the bottom. Keep putting in layers of kitchen waste for your worms to eat. As they feed they will produce castings that are excellent for the garden. Worms can eat a fifth of their body weight each day. You need only a handful or two of wriggly worms to get started, but you can’t use just any old ones. You need to buy special worms – Tiger, Red Wriggler and Indian Blues are the best. If your farm is cool, dark and moist, they will happily make babies and so increase the worm workforce. Please note that cutting a worm in half does not make two worms . . . it makes a dead worm. If you’re a good worm farmer, the number of wrigglers should double every 2–3 months. But you’ll cause a worm wipeout if you add too much water, citrus peels or onion. Ee-ai-ee-ai-oh!
nearby got sick of black bits on their washing and in their lungs. These days we know that incinerators produce carbon dioxide that may add to global warming. So what’s the answer? Burning, burying, or changing the way we do things so there’s less waste in the first place? (Don’t go to the back of the book, you won’t find the answer there. It’s the continuing Big Question that no one has fully solved yet.) Even if you can’t figure it out, I’ll be as happy as a hungry ape with a sack of bananas if you take the trash test, rev up your recycling and have a crack at composting.
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4 DOWN THE DRAIN In this chapter, we’re going to talk toilets. Let’s face it, we all produce ‘bodily wastes’. The question is what to do with them. Ancient writers tackled the problem. For a start, the Bible contains instructions about what to do with what comes from yer bum. (It’s true. Check out Deuteronomy, chapter 23, verses 9–14.) Over 2000 years ago, a writer and scientist named Aristotle instructed Alexander the Great that all human and animal waste must be taken ‘far from camp’. We hope they dug a hole for it and covered it. The dig-a-hole system was all right for small groups, but as soon as people started to gather in 35
large numbers, someone needed to invent plumbing. Someone did. The ancient Romans are well known for their pipes and drains, but the people of Crete and Ephesus had some smart systems as well.
The men’s, Turkish style
The ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus in Turkey are visited by thousands of tourists every year. You can see the remains of a library and amphitheatre, and pop in to the men’s loos of the time. It’s an open room with 36
no cubicles or doors, just a row of marble seats around the walls. The men of the city could stop in for a sit-down or stand-up and a chitty-chat. How did they know where the loos were if they were desperate? Easy-peasy. Signs were carved into the street pavers to mark the way. Ephesian women didn’t have to cross their legs, but their loo was elsewhere, not in the main street. Not too far from Ephesus, on the island of Crete, English archaeologist Arthur Evans discovered the palace ruins of King Minos. He found a multi-roomed palace, a system for removal of wastewater and rubbish – and what looks like a flushing toilet!
The Cloaca Maxima This is not a big cloak but an ancient sewer system in Rome. It was built about 3000 years ago. The Cloaca Maxima can be seen (and sometimes smelled) today, but it is no longer the main drain for the city. 37
TRASH FACT In 1612 Italian artist Lodovico Carracci painted a picture of St Sebastian being thrown into the Cloaca Maxima.
Flushed out by earthquake
An earthquake covered Minos’s city, 4000 years ago. Earthquakes may also have caused the people of Ephesus to flee their city. Rome was overrun by fierce warrior tribes who were far too busy killing people to check that the pipes were working. After that, humankind took several steps backwards in the plumbing department. ‘Running water’ and flushing loos were not used again for thousands of years.
Emperor’s dunny China claims to have invented toilet paper, around the year 900, but their sanitary systems are much older 38
than that. A 2000-year-old toilet has been discovered in Henan, China – in a king’s tomb! The toilet had a stone seat, running water and armrests. Why was it in his tomb? Because the people of the time believed that in death you still needed everything you’d had in life, including a dunny fit for a king.
More royal conveniences Queen Elizabeth I (‘Good Queen Bess’) had a godson, Sir John Harrington, and Sir John decided to give his godmama a wee present – a toilet. The earlier conveniences, called ‘garde-robes’, were built as an enclosed seat in a dressing room, and your bizzo dropped into a moat or a barrel below. Sir John thought he could do better. He built an ‘Ajax’, a toilet that was flushed with water. The bad news was that proper plumbing hadn’t been re-invented yet, so there were no pipes to take away the doings. The chamber had to be emptied by hand. Everyone at the time poo-poohed Sir John’s idea, and happily continued using their chamber pots, 39
copper ones for the commoners and silver for the wealthy. It was the French who picked up on Sir John’s john, calling it the Angrez.
Patented pots Alexander Cummings was the first to come back to Sir John’s idea and improve on it – 200 years later. After that, various valve-type flush toilets were patented and Joseph Bramah invented one called ‘the Bramah’. A Bramah toilet is still used in the House of Lords today. By 1819, Albert Giblin had taken out a patent for his ‘Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer’, and in the early 1850s George Jennings introduced the ‘S-trap’ system, with a ceramic bowl and pedestal. He opened it to the public at the Great Exhibition of 1851 . . . 40
charging people a penny to piddle. Ever heard someone talk about going to spend a penny? (Ask your gran!) In the USA, the rush to the final flush was won by Thomas Twyford. He improved on Bramah’s design, with a one-piece toilet like the ones we use today. Before the Twyford toilet, it was hard to avoid a stink from leaky joins. In England in 1848 an Act of Parliament was passed saying that every home must have a water closet (indoor toilet) or a privy or ashpit (outdoor dunny). Before that, sometimes a whole street shared the same loo. It wasn’t till much later that most people had proper plumbing and running water from indoor taps. MIN ER’S LOO 41
Crapper for the Crown You may have heard that a man called Thomas Crapper invented the modern toilet. Not quite true. His company, Thomas Crapper & Co. Ltd, designed and made plumbing fittings. Crapper & Co. was granted a royal warrant to supply plumbing and drainage to King Edward VII’s Sandringham house. Thomas later received three other warrants for the firm. Royal wees were again being flushed away, thousands of years after King Minos sat on the throne . . . that’s the white throne, not the gold one!
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Risky rivers All the early toilets sent sewage straight into rivers, streams and moats. It was a long time before people realised they should keep it separate from drinking water. In 1859 the River Thames in England became so fouled and stinking from the waste of London’s 3 million inhabitants and the outpouring of industrial gloop that Parliament was shut down. In Chicago about 25 years later, a four-day flood caused sewer waste to wash into Lake Michigan and contaminate the drinking water. About 75 000 people died from water-borne diseases. The city engineers decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River so that it no longer emptied into the lake. The Ganges River is sacred to the Hindu people of India. ‘Sacred’ doesn’t mean clean, though, because millions of people bathe in the river, drink from it, 43
TRASH FACT There’s a type of dolphin living in the Ganges that’s well adapted to the dirty river water. It’s absolutely blind and relies on sonar to find its way around.
wash their clothes in it, put their dead in it (on floating funeral pyres) and discharge their raw sewage into it. Until 1985, many riverside industries also dumped waste in the Ganges.
Space nappies Even in space, waste is a problem. Astronauts are equipped with a MAG. That’s a Maximum Absorption Garment, or disposable nappy, that they wear inside their spacesuit. A spacewalk can last up to seven hours, so you probably have to choose between using a MAG or wetting your pants.
Baby blues
TRASH FACT takes for a disposable nappy to break The average down. Pick a number – 200, 300, baby generates 400 years – and you could be right. 845 kilograms We do know that every baby using (1860 pounds, or disposables goes through around nearly a tonne!) 6000 of them before they’ve got the of nappy waste toilet sussed out. Until recently every before being disposable ever made was lurking toilet-trained. Nobody knows exactly how long it
under the lid of the landfill. Why ‘until recently’? Well, in Australia these nappies can now be recycled. The service, launched in 2004 in Melbourne, will reprocess them to recover the original 45
plastic and wood pulp parts. It’s true that you could some day park your butt on a park bench that was once part of a nappy that your butt was in.
Sewage to sludge ‘Sewage’ is the waste produced by flushing the loo. The dirty water from washing ourselves, our clothes and our dishes is named ‘wastewater’. Factories also make waste water and it usually travels in the same pipes as the sewage on the way to a treatment plant. (By the way, never put an ‘er’ in sewage unless you’re talking about pipes and drains. Sewage flows through a sewerage system. Got that?) At the treatment plant, any solid things that won’t rot are taken out – things like sand, pebbles, gravel, toothbrushes, pantyhose, plastic straws and combs, wood, disposable nappies, false teeth, pins, cigarette butts and various plastic items. They are carted to a landfill. The liquid that remains is left to settle – the heavy, sludgy stuff sinks to the bottom and watery stuff sits on top. Like compost, the watery bit is full of tiny 46
bacteria that do quite a bit of cleaning up of their own. Sometimes chlorine or UV lamps are used to clean the water too. When the water finally makes its way to the sea or lake or is re-used for irrigation, the sun does the rest. Oh, the sludge . . . you want to know about the sludge? It’s held in tanks where more bacteria help break it down and let off, you guessed it, methane gas. It can also be dried for burning or turning into fertiliser, or it’s sent to a landfill.
Lime and the long drop We’ve all been camping and had to hold our nose as we entered the dreaded long drop. At the poshest outdoor dunnies, you might find a bucket of lime so you can throw a handful in afterwards. Limestone helps keep the stink down, improves soil and kills bacteria, but sorry, it doesn’t do a thing about the flies.
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TRASH FACT In Vietnam, people’s poo is used to fertilise strawberries.
5 DIGGING UP THE REAL DIRT Most of the the things we think we need are made with raw materials mined from the ground. Drink cans from aluminium, bricks from clay, car fittings and bathroom taps from chrome, electrical wiring from copper, Grandad’s new hips and racing bike frames from titanium . . . What we dig from the dirt usually
TRASH FACT Glass may take 1 million years to break down.
ends up hurled on the heap, unless we re-use and recycle. One of the best things to re-use and recycle is glass, because it just doesn’t rot. 48
People have come up with some brainy ways of re-using glass containers. Take Tressa Prisbrey and Gabriel dos Santos.
A hundred green bottles lurking in the wall ‘Anyone can do anything with a million dollars. Look at Disney. But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it,’ said Tressa Prisbrey. ‘Grandma’ Prisbrey lived in California, and she really took the re-use/recycle message to heart. Starting at the age of 60, she constructed 13 buildings and 22 sculptures out of old bottles and other ‘rubbish’. She used beer bottles, medicine bottles, jam jars, car headlights, telegraph poles, venetian blinds, shells and even lipstick cases. Grandma Prisbey isn’t the only bottle builder. You can find bottle houses all around the world. There is even a house made entirely of empty embalming-fluid bottles (creepy). One couple, Bob and Dora Cain, had 49
so many visitors to their glass buildings that they had to add a ‘public convenience’ (another name for a loo!), made out of . . . you guessed it, over 1000 glass bottles.
The garden that Gabriel built Gabriel dos Santos, a poor man from Brazil, turned his home into a floral work of art. He used pieces of pottery, china, glass, wall tiles, shells, pebbles, chains, metal lids, terracotta pipes and car headlights to make flowery decorations on and in his house. The house is called Casa da Flor, meaning house of the flower. Before he died in 1985, Gabriel said that he built it 50
‘out of nothing’. No worries if you broke a plate when you were there for dinner, it would be turned into petals in no time flat.
Glass, gold, glare Add massive heat to sand, soda ash and lime and you’ve got glass. It seems to have been first made in Syria, where the bottles, beads and mosaics would have belonged only to the rich. Later in history, Romans had windows and mirrors. Venetian glassmakers were famous and their ingredients for coloured glass were top secret. It’s no secret now that gold is added to windowpanes to stop glare from the sun, and that adding lead makes crystal. But did you know that flat glass is made by floating melted glass on tin? And even though glass looks hard, it’s actually a ‘super-cooled liquid’. Shattering stuff. 51
NEW GLASS FROM OLD
1 Glass is collected. 2 Glass is sorted by colour. Contaminants such as metal, plastic, china, ceramics and stones are removed.
5 The molten (melted) glass is
transferred to machines where gobs of it are dropped into a ‘shaping mould’ to make a bottle or jar, or air is blown into globules of glass to form bottles, which are slowly cooled.
3 The glass is crushed. The crushed glass (‘cullet’) is used either on its own, if it’s good glass, or with virgin glass added.
4 The ingredients are fed into a furnace at a temperature of 1500 degrees Celsius. 52
Holy fulgurite, Batman! Did you know that lightning can make natural glass? When the lightning strikes quartz sand or mountainous rock with the right moisture content, then Kapow – a special lump of glass called a fulgurite is formed. A fulgurite isn’t much use for anything, so I guess you could say God makes garbage too.
The good, the bad and the virgin TRASH FACT is that it can be successfully Recycled glass takes recycled without adding new a quarter of the glass in the process. But you energy needed to need to make sure it’s good glass. produce the same ‘Good’ glass means all clear, amount of new glass. The great thing about glass
green and amber bottles, all glass jars, and all clear sauce bottles. ‘Bad’ glass is broken window and windscreen glass, light bulbs, medical bottles and 53
‘treated’ glass (like safety glass and Pyrex dishes) that has extra ingredients in it. Before putting out your glass for recycling, make sure it is clean. Remove all labels, lids and metal parts, because glass can’t be successfully recycled when it has contaminants in it. ‘Virgin’ glass is glass that has never been recycled.
TRASH FACT CHALLENGE Glass is made in furnaces at high temperatures. Because of the shortage of fuel for their furnaces, a number of European glassmakers went to America. Some of them were killed in a massacre by Indians, and the rest were so frightened that they went back home. I challenge you to find out when and where.
Steel yourself . . . Steel is used for hundreds, thousands of things; parking meters, manhole covers, school chair and desk frames, food cans . . . 54
We talk about ‘tinned’ food because the steel cans are coated with tin. The tin prevents rust and keeps the food safe to eat. How do you know if something is steel? Easy, put a magnet on it. If the magnet sticks, it’s steel. Like glass, steel is easy to recycle. But we don’t do enough of it. For example, in Western Australia, 5000 tonnes of steel cans were used in 1999, and fewer than one in five were recycled. That means over 60 million cans were dumped. What a disaster. Around the world, though, steel is
TRASH FACT Steel is made in huge furnaces, from In the USA, iron ore, limestone and coke (the fuel, a car is recycled not the fizzy stuff). Recycling steel almost every means we use less of these resources, half-hour. recycled more than any other material.
and we cut down on air and water pollution. Here’s how much. Every tonne of steel that’s recycled means 51⁄2 tonnes of iron ore can stay in the ground. Likewise with limestone – the workers can lean on their shovels and leave 264 kilograms (580 pounds) right 55
where it is. Best of all, over 3 tonnes of coal is saved, keeping the air clear of smoke and carbon dioxide.
Can you do the can plan? Follow the can plan for recycling. That means you clean and put out for collection all cans, paint tins, coffee and oil tins including their lids, jam-jar lids and aerosol cans. (Don’t crush or pierce aerosols.) Fridges, washing machines and dryers can be dropped off at a scrap metal yard for recycling. So what happens to your cans after they’ve been collected from your nature strip? They are sorted, shredded and crushed into bales. They need to be
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‘de-tinned’ before they are processed, in a kind of bath with an electric current going through it. Then it’s bubble, bubble, toil and trouble as the steel is melted with other materials at searing temperatures of 1700 degrees Celsius. Then it’s converted into cans, more lids and a heap of other things – pipes and plate, beams and balustrades. Bridge spans and railroad ties are made out of almost 100 per cent recycled steel.
Awesome aluminium Why is aluminium awesome? Because almost every bit of
TRASH FACT re-used over and over again. It takes Two billion (that’s 2 000 000 000) 80–100 years cans are recycled in Australia every year. for aluminium By recycling one aluminium can, cans to break you save enough energy to power your down. aluminium is recycled and
television set for three hours or keep your reading light on for 20 hours. Electrifying! 57
Troublesome tyres What makes them troublesome? Well, being all bouncy and rubbery, those tyres wriggle their way about in a dump or landfill to poke out the top all the time. Remember how everything is compacted (squeezed to smallness) in a landfill? A tyre doesn’t take compaction lying down. Lots of landfill owners say tyres have to be cut up before disposal, others say tsk, tsk, they don’t want them at all. Tyres just don’t do what they are told! Tyres like to be treated as if they matter rather than being trod into the dirt, and are happy to be re-used as Sandals in Africa (would you like steel radials, or just a retread?) Swings in the park Garden ornaments (have you ever seen an ugly duckling tyre turned into a swan?) A huge tractor tyre makes a great kids’ sandpit – just add sand. Boxers can have a bash on a punching bag filled with ground-up tyre rubber. 58
A garland of tyres hung on the side of the wharf protects boat hulls – sometimes big old barges have tyres already attached. These are great ideas for re-using tyres, but if you want to be a zillionaire when you grow up, invent something that recycles or re-uses tyres in big numbers.
Hello . . . hello? Mobile phones can be recycled. If you broke them down into separate parts you could extract nickel (used to make stainless steel), cadmium (used for batteries) and copper. There’s something else too. From 50 000 mobiles, you’d produce 1 kilogram (over 2 pounds) of gold.
The paper chase In the olden days, paper was made from papyrus, cotton, linen and silk rags, hemp, mulberry bark, bamboo or flax. Dried and stretched animal skins were also once used for writing on. 59
Now we use paper made from mashed-up trees with chemicals added. Usually, the whiter the paper, the greater the amount of chemicals in it. Most kinds of paper can easily be recycled: for example, newspaper, magazines, junk mail, telephone directories, school and office paper and envelopes. Papers that can’t be recycled include foil packaging used for chocolates and cigarette packets, waxed papers, fax paper, chip packets, tissues. The quantities we use and could recycle are huge. In Western Australia, one company alone recycles 90 000 tonnes of paper a year.
Paper versus plastic People used to say that a paper bag was ‘better’ than a plastic bag because it would rot quickly, but if the bag goes to landfill it makes no real
TRASH FACT Paper can be recycled up to 8 times.
difference. In a landfill, without oxygen or moisture, a paper bag and its contents will not decompose either.
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HISTORY OF THE PAPER BAG Paper bags were first used in England in 1844. Industrial production of paper bags began in the United States almost 10 years later. Frances Woolle, a 35-year-old schoolteacher from Pennsylvania, took out a patent for the machine that made them. The company he founded, The Union Bag and Paper Corporation, produced in one year enough paper bags for every American home to have 250 of them. I bet Frances Woolle never dreamed of edible paper, though. Have you ever had a fancy birthday cake with a picture on it? The picture is printed with edible inks onto paper-thin sheets of sugar and laid over the icing on the cake. Rice can be made into paper too, but don’t try doing your homework on it, it’s really best for wrapping up won-tons. Yum-yum.
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6 PLASTIC FANTASTIC? Plastic changed the world. Until this man-made product was invented in the early 1900s, most things were hand-made out of wood, glass or metal. Early inventors tested natural substances like gum from tropical trees, or horn, and tried moulding them into different shapes. Then they began adding artificial compounds to plant products and milk to make plastic-type materials that could be moulded into buttons, plates for false teeth and handles for knives. Most of the raw materials used to make today’s plastics are based on waste products from petroleum refineries. 62
It seems odd that something made from natural, organic material should become so resistant to decay after adding just a little bit of this or that. Now plastic is everywhere – in our homes, workplaces, schools, vehicles and even our clothing. Plastic items fill our landfills, never to decay away.
Elephant saver American John Hyatt was asked to find a substitute for ivory billiard balls made from elephant tusks. He produced celluloid, one of the early successful plastics, in 1868. John Hyatt and his brother patented their discovery.
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Across the Atlantic, a London inventor named Alexander Parkes, using similar ingredients, had already made what he called Parksine and exhibited it in London in 1862. Mr Parkes didn’t really make a go of it, though, and lost a lot of money.
Bakelite boom It was Leo Baekeland who brought modern plastic to the world. Leo was born in Belgium but lived in America, and his experiments with formaldehyde and carbolic acid gave rise to Bakelite. Clever Leo had also invented a celluloid product that he sold to Kodak in 1899. He used the money from that sale to start a factory that turned out Bakelite goods of every description – even jewellery. The success of Bakelite was due to a patent on the product that didn’t run out until 1927. 64
Before television (yes it’s true, there was a time before television), radios were all the go and a Bakelite radio was stylish and affordable. The Bakelite boom had begun! Soon Leo’s factories were producing 200 000 tonnes of it every year. If you ask the oldest person you know if they had a Bakelite radio or bracelet or telephone, the answer will probably be yes.
Pastel parties Check your kitchen cupboards and see if you can find any pastel-coloured containers with an airtight fitted lid labelled ‘Tupperware’. Earl Tupper invented the product in the 1940s after working for the Du Pont company in America. His tough plastic boxes were sold throughout the world by door-to-door salespeople and at home demonstrations known as ‘Tupperware parties’. 65
A good thing about Tupperware is that it takes a waste product from oil refineries, black polyethylene slag, and makes it into something useful. Fantastic!
Harry and Larry’s great invention Harry Wysyluk and Larry Hanson invented the green plastic rubbish bag in the 1950s. Originally meant for hospitals, it was quickly accepted as a household item. The Union Carbide Company in Lindsay, USA bought Wysyluk and Hanson’s invention and produced it as a ‘Glad Garbage Bag’ for home use in the 1960s. Plastic bags are used by millions, but British people think they are one of the worst inventions ever. (How do I know? The British Patents
TRASH FACT Office ran a poll on the best and worst America makes inventions.) We’re not so glad about enough plastic the bag now, poor Harry and Larry. film in a year to shrink-wrap the state of Texas.
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THE PLASTIC RE-CYCLE
1 Plastics are collected. 2 Plastics are sorted, usually by hand, into the different types.
5 The pellets are taken to factories, melted with other ingredients and made into new plastic items.
3 Each type of plastic is sliced into flakes and washed.
4 Once the plastic is clean, the plastic flakes are melted together, squeezed out like icing from a piping bag, and chopped into pellets.
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A real pet Nathaniel Wyeth worked for the American company, Du Pont. When he asked why fizzy drink wasn’t in a plastic bottle, he got many different replies: ‘The bottles aren’t strong enough.’ ‘They explode.’ ‘The government hasn’t given approval.’ Basically, cold, unfizzy water was poured on his idea, but Nathaniel found a way to make a lighter, stronger plastic by changing the ingredients from polypropylene to polyethylene terephthalate (PET). This resulted in more elasticity (stretchiness) and he found a way to make the material strong enough to contain carbonated drinks under pressure. It was more or less a lucky mistake that the PET bottles are also excellent for recycling. 68
Become a symbol sleuth Plastics are stamped with an identifying code, usually inside the recycling loop symbol. This does not always mean the plastic is recyclable, but at least it tells us what the ingredients are. That’s useful to the people who sort the plastic items in our rubbish. There are seven codes and each number relates to a type of plastic.
r r r r r r r 1
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)
2
High-density polyethylene (HDPE)
3
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC)
4
Low-density polyethylene (LDPE)
5
Polypropylene (PP)
6
Polystyrene (PS)
7
Other resins, like acrylonitrile butadine styrene (ABS)
The list of plastics goes on and on (there are at least 40 different types), but you might fall asleep reading about them, so let’s stop at seven. PET commonly contains fizzy drinks. HDPE is the type of plastic that our milk containers
are made of. PVC includes all vinyl products like your garden hose
and old music records – oh, and your sister’s Barbie doll (see box). LDPE is found in things like plastic food containers,
it is softer and more flexible than HDPE and melts at a lower temperature. PP is a lightweight but hard plastic that needs very high
temperatures to melt and is used to make suitcases and briefcases, hinged lunchboxes and plastic trim in cars. PS is what we all know as Styrofoam.
TRASH TONGUE-TWISTER PHB, polyhydroxybutyrate, is one bio-degradable plastic. Try saying that fast ten times. 70
BARBIE IS SOOOOO PLASTIC Barbies are made of PVC and first appeared in 1959. Lots of people say Barbie should be banned because she is so perfect-looking that girls might think that’s what they have to grow up to look like. Others spread terrible rumours about old Barbies being toxic and causing health problems. This simply isn’t true. Sometimes the ingredients added to PVC that keep a Barbie flexible make their way to the surface and the doll feels greasy. Earl Tupper had the same problem with his Tupperware. Throw your mum’s old Barbie in the sink with some detergent, pat her dry and kiss her goodnight all you like, she’s not dangerous at all (unless you stand on her in the middle of the night on your way to the loo . . . that can hurt). Barbie has a symbol on her butt (not about recycling). Depending on what’s written there, Mum’s old Barbie could be worth hundreds of dollars to a collector. Now that’s a fact sure to get boys interested in dolls!
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Ten trash trivia items, plastic-coated Recycling 1 tonne of plastics saves enough energy to run a refrigerator for a month. 125 recycled plastic milk bottles, about 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds), are added to virgin plastic to make a 120-litre (26-gallon) wheeliebin. Australians generate more than 1.3 million tonnes of plastic every year. They chug through enough soft drink to fill 50 000 tonnes of bottles, enough milk to fill 30 000 tonnes of milk containers and enough shampoo and detergent to fill more than 10 000 tonnes of plastic packaging. (Smart readers will notice that this doesn’t add up to 1.3 million. The rest comes from shrink-wrap, shopping bags and other types of plastic.) Someone has worked out that 6.9 billion plastic bags are used in Australia every year. If they were flattened out into one big sheet, they’d almost cover the city of Melbourne. 72
Burning plastic creates toxic fumes, do not burn plastic to get rid of it. PET plastics become polar fleece, pillowfill and even carpet once recycled.
Tying a knot in white plastic shopping bags means they are less likely to blow away. In 1982 an artificial plastic heart kept American Barney Clark alive for 112 days.
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Plastic is in space – many of the parts of air and space vehicles are made from high-tech plastics with glass and carbon fibres added for strength. According to Recycling Ohio, 1200 soft-drink and salad-dressing bottles would make enough carpet to cover your living-room floor. Inventors are working all the time to find ways of making plastic fully bio-degradable (plastic that will decompose, or rot) and recyclable, but they haven’t found an affordable solution yet. So for now we need to reduce, re-use and recycle as often as we can to help our environment.
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7 SPACE JUNK AND ODD SOCKS When it comes to waste there is so much else to talk about that it’s a whole new heap to leap.
Hand me down a vintage gown Most people send clothes that they’ve finished with to a charity so that someone else can use them. Perhaps your mum found the ‘perfect’ costume for your part in the school play at the local op shop or from the jumble stall. Some old clothes are worth money. ‘Flapper’ dresses from the 1920s and full-skirted frocks from the 1950s 75
are called ‘vintage’ and can be sold for a lot more than the original owner paid for them. If you can find a frock from 50 or more years ago, made by a big-name designer, you could sell it to a specialist shop or collector for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars.
Pick that up right now TRASH FACT In Berlin there is a type of bin that says ‘Thank you’ when you put the rubbish in. The talking bins speak in three languages, but they don’t know how to say ‘Whoops, you missed!’
Most of us want our streets and parks free of rubbish. In 2004, over 35 million volunteers from 114 countries cleaned up all around the world. If you’d like to do the same or find out what’s happening in your area, log on to www.cleanup.com.au or www.cleanupnz.org.nz.
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Space waste Outer space is full of junk, a garbage-go-round endlessly orbiting the Earth. Some of the bits are big enough to track here on Earth. What’s up there?
the top parts of rockets satellites that have fallen apart, blown up or that just don’t work any more clamps and bolts and hundreds of bags of rubbish from space stations and space missions. There are even droplets of wees and poos and paint and oil. 77
It’s a real mess, but until somebody invents an enormous space vacuum cleaner, it will just keep on floating about.
The serious stuff Injections, ouch, they produce rubbish too. Used needles have to be disposed of in a special way. You may have noticed a plastic container at the doctor’s surgery for them. Medical rubbish is labelled with a symbol of its own, and often the colour red is on the plastic bags or tags, warning that hazardous waste is inside. After an operation, blood and bone and body bits sometimes have to be disposed of, but hospitals can’t put it in their normal rubbish bin or they’ll get into serious trouble. A lot of medical waste is burned at very high temperatures, and some of it is taken to a landfill, but only after it has been made safe.
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Other kinds of hazardous waste that need special handling are paint, oil, asbestos, fertiliser and chemicals. They should not be disposed of in your household rubbish or washed away down drains.
Warning: radioactive Generating nuclear energy causes dangerous waste from the moment the uranium is mined, while it’s being used and even when it’s being thrown out . . . not that you can just throw out nuclear waste. In parts of Europe nuclear waste is recycled, but mostly the waste is stored for 40 years or more while the radioactivity lessens before being finally stored in specialised disposal sites.
The dead end What happens to our bodies after we’ve finished with them? Strangely enough, the same methods apply to bodies as to rubbish – burning, burying, re-using and even recycling. 79
In many cultures around the world, people start by cleaning and preparing the body for burial or cremation (burning). This is done with a lot of respect and care. Washing may involve wine, oils and spices and may be done by only men, only women, only family or a stranger (e.g. hospital staff or the undertaker). There might be extra rituals like placing special fabrics, spices or soil on or around the body, putting coins on eyes, or lighting candles before the body is buried or cremated. Some people celebrate the dead every year and burn money, food, cars or other items for the dead person to have in the afterlife. The strangest burial grounds I ever saw were in Torajaland, Indonesia. After funerals lasting several days, the
TRASH FACT You can go on a tour to Torajaland, advertised as ‘the land of the living dead’.
dead body is taken to a hillside cave or burial site and left to rot away to bones. An effigy (a very posh scarecrow made to look like the dead person) is left looking over their village, and family members bring food and cigarettes. 80
Burning bodies or cremation isn’t new. Vikings used to send a body out to sea in a burning boat, but that didn’t make Englishman Sir Henry Thompson’s job any easier. He spent ten years trying to convince everyone that cremation was cheaper and more hygienic than burial. It also saved space, yet it wasn’t until 1885 that cremation was made legal.
How and where we bury people today is also covered by laws, but it is possible in Australia and New Zealand to have a do-it-yourself funeral and be buried where you want, by whoever you want. If you like, you can be buried in a coffin especially designed to break down quickly in the earth. People who are really keen on re-using put themselves on a list to give away their organs after 81
death. Their hearts, eyes, livers, bone marrow and other body parts may help somebody else to live a healthier life. It seems we just can’t help ourselves. Even when we’re dying we make more rubbish.
FINAL TRASH FACT, FROM THE SOCK FILES You know those odd socks you can never find the pair for? Wherever they are, it will take 1–5 years for the woollen ones to rot, and as for the ones made of synthetic fibres, your grandchildren may find them yet.
IS THIS BOOK A LOAD OF RUBBISH? YOU BE THE JUDGE Now that you’ve read this book, you might say it’s a waste of space. Or you could say it’s a great example of reduce, re-use, recycle. I read over 760 pages of information (more than 400 000 words) to find the facts in this book and reduced them to 10 000 words. The rest won’t be wasted, I’ll re-use them in another book! If you lend this book to friends, or get it from the library, it will be re-used many times. And if you dig up a copy in a landfill in 50 years time, you might find that you can still read it!
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D E B O R A H B U R N S I D E dreamed of being a ballerina, famous writer or an astronaut when she grew up, but never ever a garbo. Her house seems like a junkyard most of the time, thanks to three sons, one husband and a large dog traipsing through it, dumping their stuff as they go. She likes zebras, but since you can’t own a zebra she has kept pigs named Pork and Bacon, and that’s probably why pigs feature in this book. Deborah’s other books and stories have been written in a little cottage by the sea, but for this one she stayed in her Clean Earth office, to be certain of sticking to trash facts. A N D R E W P L A N T has illustrated over 120 books, but this is the very first one he’s done about rubbish. Dinosaurs are his favourite subject, and he travels the world to catch up with the latest fossil dig. He draws heaps of doodles and sketches that end up as garbage, but he always recycles the paper.
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Thanks Thanks to Allen & Unwin for thinking a book about rubbish was a good idea. Much appreciation to Paul Dunford at the Napier City Council for checking my sewage copy and ensuring any budding wastewater engineers have the right info. Thanks to Joanne Johnson for permission to use the quotation from ‘Grandma’ Prisbrey. Thanks to the Google guys for creating such a fabulous search engine (I love the people who quote their sources and allow information sharing), and to the Taradale Library for the resource books and letting me plonk down in the aisles, scatter books around myself and scribble on bits of paper. To Ray and Nicki, for everything, to Robert for the maths, to Janine Adler-Parker for permission to cite her Hands-on Maths website, and to all those not mentioned who answered my questions, said ‘yes’ and helped me find and confirm the facts in this book, I thank you too. Heaps. Deborah Burnside The publishers would like to thank istockphoto.com and the following for photographs used in the text: page i concrete sign Jorge Delgado; page v crushed can Jim Jurica; pages viii–1 rubbish dump Frank Wright; page 36 Ephesus Patrick Roherty; page 41 miner’s loo Jo Ann Snover; page 58 tyres Vaide Dambrauskaite; page 61 paper bag Ron Hohenhaus; page 64 Bakelite phone Clayton Hansen; page 69 vinyl record Andrzej Tokarski; page 72 plastic containers Diane Diederich; page 76 sign John Shepherd; page 78 syringe etc. Erick Jones; page 82 lost sock Neil Bromfield. Thanks also to Ruth Grüner for the image of the crushed paper bag.
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Glossary dump an area where waste is
re-use use something again,
left (maybe it’s what your room looks like sometimes), usually run by the local council hazardous waste rubbish or waste that can cause damage to people, plants, animals or even the air we breathe if it isn’t disposed of correctly – oil, paint, batteries, asbestos, medical waste, radioactive waste, toxic fumes, chemical spills landfill a rubbish disposal area, like a dump but with more care taken to store waste safely – can be owned privately or run by local councils under strict rules and regulations patent a document proving that you own completely the design of the thing you’ve invented so that nobody else can make one without asking you first or paying you something for it
either for the same purpose or a different one recycle process something so it can be re-made into something else – like cardboard being turned into egg cartons, or softdrink bottles being turned into polar fleece sewage umm, er, you know – ones and twos and all the other stuff you flush down the loo sewerage system the pipes, drains and equipment that all of the above flows through wastewater water that’s been used once already (in your bath, on your garden, for cooling in factories, etc.)
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Where to find out more Books
Websites
• www.howstuffworks.com • www.wastewise.wa.gov.au • www.gould.edu.au/ schools.index.asp • www.homestead.com/ prosites-closetheloop • http://echomatic.home.
Kate Walker, series including Household Waste, Aluminium, Glass, Paper, Plastics and Steel, Macmillan Education Australia, Melbourne, 2004 Susan Watson, Living Sustainably, Macmillan Education Australia, Melbourne, 2003
mindspring.com/bv/index.html
For teachers
Katie Daynes, The Story of Toilets, Telephones and Other Useful Inventions, illustrated by Adam Larkum, Usborne Books, London, 2004
• www.ceres.org.au • www.ecorecycle.vic.gov.au • www.zerowaste.co.nz • www.nationalgeographic.com • www.envirolink.org • www.dpgraph.com/janine/
Green Files – Waste and Recycling, David West Children’s Books, London, 2003
mathpage/handson.html
Jane Walker, Environmental Disasters series, The Ozone Hole, 2nd edn, and in the same series, Vanishing Habitats and Species, Oil Spills and Atmosphere in Danger, Franklin Watts, London, 2003
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Index aluminium 57 Athens 11
incineration 23, 32, 34
Bakelite 64 banana skins 26–8 Barbie 70
landfills 17–21 lime 47 London 2, 12
compost 28, 29–32
Mafia 1, 9 methane 5, 18, 47 mobile phones 59 Mobius loop 25 movies 4, 5 Mount Everest 6–7 mudlarks 10, 14
Destructor 32, 34 dogs’droppings 3, 12, 16 dolphin 44 dumps 11, 17 dustmen 15–16 fashion 7–8, 75–6 FBI 1, 3 fish 23, 47 fizzy drink bottles 70 glass 48–54 gold 51, 59 Greeks 17 hazardous waste 78–9
nappies 44–6 newspaper see paper paper 19, 21, 24, 59–61 pigs 5–6, 12, 14 Plague 13 plastic 62–74 police 3 purefinders 16
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rakers 10, 13 recycling 3, 7–8, 8–9, 15, 22–33, 45–6, 48-51, 52, 53–61, 67, 68, 79–81 re-using 15, 22, 23, 47, 49–51, 75–6, 81–2 River Ganges 43–4 River Thames 16, 43 rivermen 16 sewage 44, 46–7 sewerage 46 space 44–5, 77–8 socks 82 toshers 10, 16 toilets 35–42, 47 Tupperware 65–6 worm farms 33
