recycling - thegoodwills.com

Australians buy 56 clothing items a year

clothing-textiles-waste — Goondiwindi cotton farmer Sam Coulton, taking part in a cotton waste recycling trial. Image from Cotton Australia

I know what you’re thinking – Crikey, someone’s buying my clothing share! That was my immediate response to a new report from the Australian Fashion Council. My trusty proof-reader, She Who Buys Quality Clothes and Keeps Them for Decades, asked: “Does that include bras and undies?”

The Clothing Data report concludes that a lot of the clothing Australians buy every year ultimately ends up in landfill. As the report shows, 62% of global clothing is made from synthetic materials. They take a long time to break down in landfill, posing a significant environmental risk. Galvanised by the approaching renewables deadline of 2030, the rag trade is driving a national stewardship scheme.

Meanwhile, Cotton Australia teamed up last year with the Queensland Government, Goondiwindi Cotton and others to start a cotton waste recycling trial. The trial diverted about two tonnes of cotton waste from landfill. The waste materials, including Emergency Services coveralls, were shredded and the material spread on a Goondiwindi cotton farm.

A year on, farmer Sam Coulton said the cotton fields at ‘Alcheringa’ easily swallowed up the shredded waste.

“We spread the cotton textile waste a few months before planting in June 2021,” he said in a statement from CA. “By January and the middle of the season, the waste had all but disappeared, even at the rate of 50 tonnes to the hectare.”

Soil scientist Dr Oliver Knox said that at the very least the trial showed no harm was done to soil health. He said at least 2.070kg of carbon dioxide equivalents (CI2 ) was mitigated through the breakdown of garments in the soil rather than in landfill.

“Soil carbon levels remained stable and the soil’s bugs responded well to the added cotton material.”

Cotton Australia’s Brooke Summers said the trial would be replicated in the 2022-2023 season with the addition of a Gunnedah cotton farm.

Hanes Australasia, owner of many textile brands including Sheridan and Bonds, said the company was keen to add its support.

“We couldn’t be more excited about the success of the trial in Goondiwindi,” Hanes president Tanya Deans said. “To think that we might have a scalable solution for textile waste on our shores is even more exciting.”

The Australian Fashion Council’s Clothing Data Report reveals that Australia currently imports 1.42 billion units of clothing per year, which equates to 373,000 tonnes of cloth.

You’d probably assume, and you’d be right, that locally manufactured clothing forms a tiny proportion of the production, with 38 million items of clothing produced annually.

On an outback trip in 2021, I bought two locally made polo shirts from Goondiwindi Cotton. Expensive, but I felt so virtuous. Most of our clothing, however, is made in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and emerging markets like Africa.

A good long time ago I was inspired to write a song “Where Do Underpants Come From?” after reading a book by Kiwi author Joe Bennett. I had some friendly correspondence with Joe as my song title was close to what he called his book “Where Underpants Come From.”

Joe was lured into writing the book after paying $8.59 for a five-pack of undies from a discount department store in Christchurch. He also lashed out on a quality pair of ‘Authentics’ for $5.99, then spent the rest of the day thinking – how could anyone possibly make a profit from selling five for $8.59?

After an initial rebuff from his agent – “Joe, it’s a crap idea. Best, Jim,” Joe set of on an investigative trail. Along the way, he trekked to China and other destinations following the supply chain from raw materials to manufactured cloth, garment-making, packaging and distribution.

If you can track this 2008 book down, it is entertaining, amusing and also illuminating, as Joe uncovers the trade’s importance to China’s emerging economy. As he says in the introduction: “There are plenty of better-informed books about China, but I suspect it is the only one that begins with a pair of underpants.”

As you may have discovered, if you deliberately go out looking for Australian-made garments, they are not easy to find and more expensive than imported items. When we first moved to Maleny in 2002, the cold winter set me off on a quest for some warm pyjamas. There was still a menswear shop in town at that stage and he showed me a pair of fleecy PJs in a black and white cow pattern. They were expensive and proved to be too warm for Maleny’s relatively mild climate (better suited for Tasmanians).

Quality lasts though and 15 years on I consigned the bottoms (the waistband elastic was gone), to the rag box. I gave the top to a musician friend who loves to dress up when she performs. I hate to think how many cheap pairs of boxers have lost their cling and gone to the rag box over the ensuing years. She Who Buys Quality Clothes and my sister-in-law (the theatre wardrobe mistress) keep trying to get me to lift my sartorial game. We go to the ballet regularly, so I don the bag of fruit I bought in Rome in 2010 and a pair of English shoes bought (in England) at a time when I was on a rare spending spree. Twelve years on, they are in good nick but alas, the tan Italian suit look came and went. Do I care?

The textile industry is important to Australia’s economy ($27 billion a year), but it is coming at a cost to the environment. The Guardian attended a meeting at which AFC chief executive, Leila Naja Hibri, admitted that the fashion industry had a “deserved” reputation for its negative impact on the environment.

“There needs to be a change in the way we design, produce, use and dispose of products,” she said.

On top of the huge amount of landfill, the textile industry also relies heavily on fossil fuels and other chemicals. Globally, 98m tonnes of non-renewable resources are used in the fashion industry, including oil to produce synthetic fibres, fertilisers to grow cotton, and chemicals to produce dye.

The Australian Fashion Council (AFC) is leading “a consortium of industry disruptors” to create Australia’s first National Product Stewardship Scheme for clothing textiles. The consortium includes brands, manufacturers, retailers, re-use charities, fibre producers, academics and waste management companies. The goal is to improve the design, recovery, re-use and recycling of textiles (with 2030 in mind), with National Waste Policy Action Plan targets.

The report, funded by the Australian government, said the annual cost to consumers was $9.2bn, meaning Australians were paying on average just $6.50 for each item of clothing.

The AFC has used the report findings to call for a levy on clothing imports to reduce textile waste. At the other end of the fashion cycle, roughly 260,000 tonnes, or 10kg a person, reaches landfill each year, the lead author of the report, Peter Allan, said.

This week I did my bit to help avoid adding textile waste to landfill, dropping off a near-new hoody to a local op shop. Perhaps it was a tight fit to begin with, but a couple of washes later, I’m like a footy player having to get someone to help me don the jersey. As a tape measure-wearing assistant in jeans shop once said (I was 40-something and shopping for a 30-inch waist), – “Um, you used to be a 30-inch waist. Sorry.”

Return of The Wastemakers

wastemakers-computers — Image: INESby, pixabay.com

I had a Vance Packard moment this week, thwarting the concept of planned obsolescence, which he wrote about in his 1960 best-seller, The Wastemakers.

My triumph was no big deal, but they were hard-won as I finally, after four weeks, got my 32-year-old Technics stereo system working again.

Before we get into that, and on a similar theme, I would like to have a rant about the complexities and nonsense of Windows 10. Microsoft’s latest operating system deserves inclusion in my seldom-heard song, ‘Windows F*****g 8’, which I wrote in honour of the man who warned me to stick with Windows 7 (…”It isn’t fair, but they don’t care, that I can’t find F*****g Solitaire”….)

When we moved, my 2015 laptop, running on Windows 7, was labouring, crashing, not responding to commands, giving me blue screens and multiple hard drive error messages. My new Lenovo has a lot going for it – extremely light, fast and not too expensive at all. But it came with Windows 10 pre-installed and an infuriating voice-activated robot called Cortana, who offers to solve any problem but more often will say “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.”

So Mr Microsoft, why did you dump Windows 7 (which, after this month will no longer be supported). in favour of an operating system that tried to look like Apple Mac and failed? Just like Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1, it has so many bugs you do so yearn for good old Windows XP. IT companies constantly upgrade and invent new software and gadgets. The manufacturers of computers, smart phones, mobile entertainment and all their peripherals have no choice, if they want to stay in business, but to continue selling us flawed ‘upgrades’. In the case of Windows 10, Microsoft forced us into it by withdrawing support for Windows 7.

Windows forums have a lot to say about 10, its dodgy updates and other shortcomings. The most irritating thing is the assumption (by Microsoft) that you will take up the expensive annual subscriptions to pre-installed software trials and store all your personal data in the cloud, at a cost, of course. After some reading, I managed to install Office 2010, which I bought and paid for once already.

The good news is there are plenty of ‘fixes’ out there for Windows 10 glitches. I found one key piece of advice (not from Microsoft). In Windows 7 I used the ‘recent documents’ link constantly. It was easily found under documents/folders. Windows 10 has done away with this useful tool.

Solution: use the keystroke Windows key/e. Thank me later.

She Who Also Has Windows 10 is now regretting asking me to upgrade her laptop. The worst part of upgrading was that (initially) we could not get the printer to work, or the network sharing we previously employed.

There is now a security feature called Network Credentials which requires you to enter your Microsoft outlook name and password if indeed you succumb to that malware-type exhortation. That only took me three hours to fix – to whom should I send the invoice?

Nevertheless, if you still have Windows 7 and it decides to stop working, you will be in trouble. The good news, if you are game, is that Microsoft’s free upgrade is still available (rather than buying it for $169). Not that I recommend it, but here is the link I used to download and install Windows F*****g 10 on SWAHWT’s laptop.

Vance Packard saw all that coming, three decades before personal and business computers became a mainstream, multi-billion dollar industry. Packard was well ahead of his time, writing a number of thoughtful books about consumerism and the stealthy way the industrial-military complex manipulates people to its own greedy ends.

The thesis Packard pursued in The Wastemakers is deftly summarised in an article found on Trove.

The author of The Hidden Persuaders and The Status Seekers analysed over-production and the planned obsolescence of so-called consumer durables.

“The average American family throws away about 750 metal cans each year,” he began. “In the Orient, a family lucky enough to gain possession of a metal can treasures it and puts it to work in some way, if only as a flower pot.”

Packard claimed that in 1960s America “each individual man, woman and child was using up to an average of eighteen tons of materials a year”.

The concept of eternal growth which developed after WWII required “insidious promotion and worship of ‘consumerism’ the encouragement of waste, the temptations of encouragement of waste and the temptations of limitless H.P (hire purchase).”

Sixty years after Packard published his book, consumerism and the advertising that encourages it is no less insidious. Rampant and shameless consumerism suggests that anything “used” is shaming to its owner.

“The escalation of self-indulgence and the planned chaos leaves the buyer bewildered and helpless amid that shambles of phoney price-cuts, sales prices, special discounts etc.”

As people often do when moving, we purchased some new consumer ‘durables’, well aware that the generic 12-month warranties suggested a limited life span.

Meanwhile, the Technics stereo system, bought from one of Brisbane’s Brashes stores in 1986, was still sitting in carefully packed boxes in the garage. Sure, I was listening to MP3s on my Bluetooth speaker, but it is so not the same.

The Technics system was top of its class in 1986 and still performs well. It has seven individual components all interlinked by a maze of cables and power cords (one feeds the other until finally, one goes to AC power).

The problem this time with installation was (a) delving through the five manuals to remember how to reconnect everything and (b) the speaker leads were too short. They were always too short, but in our previous home it was never a problem.

I am not, as you’d know, not the world’s most practical chap. But I’m stubborn (and cheap). I turned to YouTube’s host of geeky how-to videos. What I wanted to do was work out how to extend the stereos leads, which is hard to do when said speakers are sealed boxes which offer no easy way to replace leads.

The first video I found (1:47) when searching ‘how to open sealed speaker cabinets’ is a classic example of why you can sometimes find helpful hints, and sometimes not!

After I stopped laughing and explored some other more useful options, I went into town and bought a 6m roll of 14 gauge speaker cable and some electrical tape. I used a box cutter and a pair of pliers to hand-cut the cable into two lengths, stripped 1cm of plastic off both ends of each cable and then used electrical tape to connect the longer leads to the short speaker cables. As such jobs go, it is not pretty. But it works.

I finished setting up the system about 11pm and rewarded myself with a cup of tea, listening to Homeless, a vinyl album by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. As you may recall, the acapella African choir’s music formed the basis of Paul Simon’s amazing 1986 album, Graceland. Simon’s song Homeless is track 1, side one. Of course I fell asleep listening to side two and never got to flip the album over.

The really good news is there are a few hundred more vinyl albums in boxes in the garage. (Ed: Not that we have anywhere to store them).

The dangers of plastic waste

plastic-recycling-dangers — Photo of plastic recycling plant fire in Birmingham (2013) courtesy of West Midlands Fire Service Photographic 2017

I wish someone had told me about Plastic Free July before August arrived. But hell, it’s never too late to start learning new tricks, eh!

In case you missed it too, this is a global initiative started in Western Australia. From its humble beginnings in 2011 with 40 people in Perth, Plastic Free July has now spread across the country and around the world. In 2016, 100,000+ Western Australians and more than 1 million people worldwide took part.

“Every bit of plastic ever made still exists and in the first 10 years of this century the world economy produced more plastic than the entire 1900’s.”

The initiative aims to educate people to cut down on their consumption of single-use plastic. The main thrust is to get people to stop using disposable shopping bags. Australians already have an incentive, in that there is already a ban in Tasmania, South Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT.

About a third of the plastic consumed in Australia ends up at recycling plants to be ‘down-cycled’ into other products. Plastic, as we know, lasts forever, unless of course it catches fire, in which case it burns as fiercely as oil or natural gas. Fire is an ever-present risk at waste and recycling plants because of the highly combustible nature of the stored materials.

In mid-July, a major fire broke out amid stockpiles of paper and plastic at the Coolaroo Recycling plant north of Melbourne. The political fall-out from this fire spread further than the smoke plume, sparking a class action threat and a move by the Victorian government to audit all recycling plants in the state.

Victoria (and other States) would probably want to avoid something like the UK’s record of fires at waste and recycling plants (300 per year), including the one depicted (above) at a recycling plant in Birmingham.

Meanwhile back home…

No-one knows for sure how many recycling plants there are in Australia because many are private companies licensed by their respective Councils. However, Deakin University environmental science lecturer Trevor Thornton, writing in The Conversation, quoted 2013 figures from the Department of Environment and Energy which estimate there are 114 waste recycling plants in Australia.

Thornton says the industry needs a national registry, updated annually. Governments need to provide tax breaks so plant operators can upgrade their equipment and also provide manufacturers with an incentive to use recyclable material in their products.

“At the same time, we should consider penalising businesses which use non-recyclable packaging when alternatives exist,” Thornton said. He cited retailers who sell goods in multi-material packaging like polystyrene and plastic without providing an alternative.

I was musing about all of this and more after realising I need to break a habit of asking for bags at the supermarket. I’ve been kidding myself that they are being re-used at home as rubbish bags. Just because a plastic bag gets used twice or even three times doesn’t make it any better for the environment.

Major supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths have already made a commitment to phase out single-use bags within a year. Woolies has revealed it uses three billion bags a year. Coles has not released data but it is probably of a similar scale.

Plasticfreejuly.org says six out of 10 Australians are already refusing single-use bags and using a variety of alternatives, all of which involve bringing your own container when you go shopping. But it’s not just a shopping problem – cling wrap, plastic water bottles, drinking straws, plastic takeaway containers and plastic cutlery are all potential sources of pollution. But as we’ll read later, it’s not as simple as chucking everything into the yellow bin.

The Waste Authority of WA says Australians use one million tonnes of plastic a year (most of it packaging) and 320,000 tonnes of it goes to landfill. But even the refuse, reuse, recycle mantra won’t be enough to hold back the tide of plastic garbage which is engulfing oceans.

Some plastic ends up in waterways and the ocean – where scientists predict there will be more tonnes of plastic than tonnes of fish by 2050.

The Plastic Oceans Foundation says the world is producing nearly 300 million tons every year, half of which is for single use. More than eight million tons is dumped into our oceans.

As for the oceans becoming a massive plastic rubbish dump, how in hell does plastic end up there? Some of it is microbeads from the manufacturing and recycling process which finds its way to the ocean via drains and runoff. Containers carrying plastic product to foreign ports fall off ships. The best-known example is the container full of thousands of yellow toy ducks lost at sea in 1992. You can read more about this phenomenon and how ocean currents play their part by browsing this educational website created by clever people at the University of NSW.

Data from plasticoceans.org underlines the impact of this pollution on the planet (plastic manufacturing uses 6% of the world’s fossil fuels). Every year 500 million bottles and one trillion bags are discarded as waste (not to mention 24.7 billion disposable nappies). On the scale of things, it’s good that a third of this waste is recycled.

While Australia seems on track to phase out single-use bags, we need to do something about our addiction to bottled water. A Choice Magazine story in 2014 highlighted the fiscal folly of choosing bottled water over tap water. If you drink two litres a day from the tap, you’ll pay about $1.50 a year, Choice said. Drink the same amount from single-serve bottles you could be looking at more than $2,800 a year.

The Australasian Bottle Water Institute says ours is a $500 million a year industry selling the equivalent of 600 megalitres (600,000,000 litres) of water a year, 60% of which is sold in single-serve bottles.

If we do use plastic, then we should at least know how to sort the different types of waste for recycling. The ABC’s Amanda Hoh, following up on the ABC’s popular War on Waste TV show, interviewed Brad Gray of Planet Ark for some tips.

Gray says the most common mistake is that people throw soft plastics such as bags, food packaging or “scrunchable” plastic in with containers. These soft plastics get caught in the conveyer belt and the whole recycling system has to be stopped so they can be removed.

“All “scrunchable” plastic including shopping bags, plastic food packaging, fruit netting and dry cleaning bags can be recycled, although most often not via your home recycle bin,” says Gray.

“The best method is to bundle all your plastic bags into one bag and take it to a REDcycle bin located in most metro and large regional supermarkets. These plastics are then recycled into plastic school furniture.”

So now I have finished this week’s FOMM, it’s hi-ho to the supermarket and co-op, sturdy hemp shopping bags in hand. Well, that’s the goal.