Ericathephantom’s Weblog

 With Britain’s landfill and carbon emission targets to achieve, people are being encouraged to recycle more in their homes and find eco-friendly changes in their everyday lifestyle.

However, all this seems a little pointless when a lot of people still don’t bother to recycle or take bigger steps towards an eco-friendly lifestyle. Some businesses still don’t recycle properly and this is criminal considering the sheer volume of recyclable materials such as paper and glass, that a business generates as waste compared to a typical household.

Working in the back of a restaurant at weekends, I personally throw away around 20 plastic containers in six hours alone because there isn’t anywhere to recycle plastic outback. As just one of around six chefs on a single shift, the total amount of waste that has the potential to be recycled is enormous.

The restaurant however does have a glass recycling facility for the bar. It could be argued that this is a lot simpler anyway, than just binning the glass in bin liners as the glass is easily smashed and broken inside the bag. Out back, there is a cardboard recycling container but this gets full halfway through the night. It isn’t that the staff don’t want to recycle, there just isn’t enough room and on a busy late Saturday night shift, there isn’t enough time to carry a bin full of cleaned and grouped plastics across a busy kitchen to the back of the car park.

Although general advice has been given, it is difficult for some businesses to recycle, then newer, more effective measures must be brought in to help out, not just the meaningless lectures. I’m sure that if a law such as taxes for unrecycled waste was bought in, you can bet that businesses would step up their mark on the recycling issue. However, would this be fair? For instance, restaurants have a lot of waste that can’t be recycled compared to other businesses and households. It’s difficult to decide what is a best and a fair recycling policy for businesses. You can’t help but feel that doing ‘your bit’ at home really isn’t doing anything at all.