We must learn to move mountains

Dec 17 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Britain is being invaded by wrapping paper and cardboard containers as we prepare for Christmas, season of goodwill and colossal waste. Where will it all go? David Charters reports

WE ARE all the makers of mountains now. By the minute, we add to the great heaps of domestic refuse – those stinking, slowly rotting symbols of our passing prosperity, threatening to kill life on the Earth, over which we were given stewardship.

But some of this rubbish can be recycled and given new purpose, instead of taking up valuable space in a tip, or destroyed in a way that poisons the atmosphere.

And down the tireless conveyor-belt at a massive recycling plant near the Mersey docks rolls the content of our bins – the plastic bags and nappies, the cardboard boxes and old clothes, sacks, last season’s football shirt, the birthday cards and soup tubs, the polystyrene burger boxes and the milk bottles, the forgotten dolls, the chop-suey wrappers and much more.

Flowing along, among it, almost unnoticed, is a Remembrance Sunday poppy. Well, you can recycle the plastic pod and the green stem, along with the petals of compressed paper.

But the memories once held in the poppy are renewed in a different way.

Every generation has its own duties, but those which have fallen to most of us are much easier than those borne by our forebears.

We are simply asked to be more careful with the disposal of our household waste for the good of the environment. Surely, we can manage that.

Although scientists on the extreme wings disagree about how much harm the refuse from our consumer society is doing to the world, all sensible people agree that recycling is a sound way of doing your bit.

You may not be able to save the rain forests on your own, but each of us would like to believe that the world we pass on to the unborn generations will be in good health. What we were given freely, we should cherish.

Preaching, however, is not close to the heart of Jonathan Gaskell, the man standing in front of the huge bales of rubbish. After all this is Bootle, not a polar ice-cap. Even so, one could be linked to the other in the hoop of life.

In fact, recycling is all about making the most of life, a philosophy that might have been a little beyond the grasp of the hen who arrived, flapping and squawking, in a skip at the yard of Gaskells Waste Services, in the town’s Foster Street. She was adopted by Jonathan, the company’s managing director, who took her to his house in Tarporley, Cheshire, where she laid fine eggs until a mink broke into the coop, leaving her in need of resurrection rather than recycling.

Gaskells, which employs some 60 people on a two-acre site, is now one of the largest waste collection, sorting and recycling plants in the North.

Essentially, industrial, commercial, municipal and trade waste from Merseyside and Cheshire is brought here. This includes cardboard, plastic, polythene. It is sorted into appropriate piles, compacted and delivered in bales, so that other operators can turn it into something new.

For example, polythene bags are melted into a paste which then goes through an extrusion machine coming out in strands like spaghetti. These are cooled down and cut into pellets which can be recycled into goods such as gardening furniture, plastic fencing and mudguards for commercial vehicles.

SOME of these changes might seem quite modest, but you have to remember that the polythene bags, which are extremely durable, would otherwise have been stuffed into holes in the ground.

How does recycling work? Quite simply, by restricting the need for new production, you are saving raw materials and reducing energy consumption.

Some of these processes are complicated. But, if you work in an office or live in a house, in danger of being taken over by cardboard, this is what Gaskells can do for you.

They will collect your cardboard or you can deliver it to them. Then the cardboard is pressed into a bale and taken into a mill for preparation, the compacted cardboard is mixed with gallons of water to make a pulp. The fibres have to be saturated, so that they can be separated and reconstituted. The pulp is fed into a machine where it goes into a mesh screen and excess water is squeezed out. The board is pressed and dried and comes off the machine on a roll or in sheets, where it can be used in paper or cardboard products.

“If people, a corner shop or whatever you like to think of, want to get rid of some cardboard, they can bring it here free of charge,” says John Cushing, another director.

“We are a waste collection company, but, as time moves on, there is going to be a shortage of landfill and alternatives dealing with waste,” adds Craig Lavell, sales director. “But every company and every person out there generates waste, so everyone has a requirement for these services. By waste, we mean something that people think can be discarded because it has no value or use.”