by Michael ATCHIA

In the current local debate about waste-to-energy and waste- to-compost from Municipal Solid Wastes (MSW), many are easily forgetting the origins of municipal wastes: it was the throw-away economy, as invented after World War II by, amongst others, the Americans, for the convenience of consumers. But as rightly pointed out by Ralph Nader and other activists, the ?no deposit, no return? approach to consumerism was launched for the benefit of industrialists and business people, not for the benefit of consumers and, in those days of 1950/1960, with total disregard for the environment. To take but one example, it was simply more convenient to put cocas in non-returnable glass bottles and charge the customer the price of the bottle, instead of recalling and recycling perfectly good used bottles. Most likely, the mother company had a subsidiary making bottles!

Such a throw-away economy, dependent on cheap energy (no more) and vast empty sites for burial of wastes (never so the case in tiny Mauritius), is no more viable: in any case it never was, if the long term health of the planet and its inhabitants is kept in mind.

So today, with our imperative to produce energy from sustainable renewable local sources, production of electricity from MSW makes good sense, provided the processes are environmentally sound and monitored to be so in daily operation. So is the waste- to-compost project, dealing with the wet organic parts of MSW and (as part of wider recycling) returning the minerals back to the land. The long-term forecast of tonnage of wastes available daily for these 2 new ?industries? (waste-to-energy and waste-to-compost) is estimated by some promoters to rise from the present 900 tonnes daily to 1400 tonnes by 2020. In my considered opinion this should, as we go into the reduce-reuse-recycle economy (which we shall), be re-estimated at only 400 tonnes, requiring a corresponding re-evaluation of the investment into these industries.

We do not want to end up like New-York with its 12,000 tons of daily ?garbage?, which is disposed of at huge costs and with great difficulty, nor like Toronto which in 2002 closed its last land-fills and shipped all of its 1 million tons of wastes produced yearly, to Wayne County in Michigan, USA. Nor of course like this European city which shipped tonnes of toxic wastes to be dumped in Drogba?s Cote d?Ivoire. No, the answer lies in good environmental education (as I have now been practicing and promoting world-wide since 1972, the year of the Stockholm conference), always starting at the earliest age in schooling and going right through to the top industrialists and decision-makers.

What you can do.

Change your life-style, join the reduce-reuse-recycle economy.We call here for a change of life-style, where we plan daily life so as to leave behind the minimum amount of wastes, where we give some thought and effort to recycling and re-using perfectly utilisable material instead of throwing it away. For example, all discarded newspapers should go into separate collection systems ending at paper mills.