Erikka Askeland: Life’s staples really make a difference

Mysteriously, they appeared, grey and stacked like dormant Daleks on our shared tenement stair. They were small, and there seemed to be one for everyone. We took one in.

I e-mailed the council before I looked inside to figure out what it was for. Ah, it was a bin for food waste – confirmed by the paperwork inside and, eventually, in a response from Ryan at the council. And while the little note said collection for our little cul-de-sac was on Monday, but it was actually Tuesday, I was pleased.

I’m of an age that I have always believed recycling is a Good Thing. For one, you should see the stacks of newspapers my household collects of a week (an occupational hazard).

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I don’t mean to come across like a holier-than-thou proselytiser, but mostly I wash out tins, jars and flatten orange juice cartons for the recycling. Although I still wonder what to do with envelopes, which are banned from the paper bins.

I have become accustomed to the trek to the bottle bank clutching bags that clink relentlessly, hoping passers-by will think “it has been a while since she recycled””rather than “what a lush””.

But until now I have not been able to recycle food scraps. Like jerry cans filled with petrol, it is not advisable to store compost bins in your flat. Sadly not everyone has a garden and outhouses – someone should tell Francis Maude.

It probably all started for me when our school was visited by Dr David Suzuki, a pioneering environmental scientist and Canada’s answer to Sir David Attenborough, but less cuddly.

Much of the detail of his stern lecture he gave that day is lost to me – it was more than 30 years ago. Yet I still remember his warnings about our impact on the planet. He discussed exponential population growth and the meadows he used to know that had been paved over by suburbs. He didn’t seem to hold out much hope for the human race. But this was why he and his family re-used and recycled nearly everything, which, in an era where there were no paper banks on the corner, was quite impressive.

He even – and this chilling detail stuck with me – recycled staples. What he did with them, I have no idea. Frankly, it terrified me. Would it come to a meagre existence of ruining your fingernails whilst separating stacks of paper to hoard little shards of metal?

You could question whether his message that day was wholly appropriate for children. I’m sure it had something to do with me later picking up a life-long smoking habit and foreswearing having children.

Yet while a scary diatribe is what gets us all off our backside to change our behaviour, maybe Dr Suzuki hadn’t reckoned for human ingenuity.

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What he didn’t predict was the likes of Zhang Yin, one of the richest people on the planet. One account of her rise saw her conflate two things. One was her awareness of a dire need for packaging materials for China’s fast growing manufacturing sector. The other was the empty cargo ships returning from delivering heaps of musical toilet roll holders and other goods to the US. So she arranged to have Americans send tons of scrap paper back to her, which she then made into cardboard. She became a billionaire.

It was recycling on a grand scale, with millions of people not throwing stuff into landfill.

Now, not only do we need to re-use raw materials, but there is a market for them. Which means it is not just the fuzzy-sock-and-sandal brigade doing it, but also sharp-eyed entrepreneurs.

As for the little bins, if you have recently got one, they are part of a drive to increase the Edinburgh’s recycling rate from its current level of just more than 35 per cent.

The Scottish Government’s Zero Waste strategy, which has set targets for us to have 50 per cent of waste recycled by 2013, 60 per cent by 2020 and an ambitious 70 per cent five years after that.

The little bins are also expected to save money, as the land fill tax the council pays is increasing each year.

Since I’ve started wrapping leftovers in old newspaper and putting them in the little bin, I have noticed a difference. It is easy and not smelly. While no-one will to make zillions from my banana peels, I am happy that the size of our rubbish bag has been reduced.