The REALLY RUBBISH Campaign

Brief History of Recycling

A Brief History of Recycling

Recycling is nothing new, it is just that as there are more and more people on the planet these days, making more and more waste we need to recycle more. Let's take a trip back in time and see how it all started.

********************************************************************************

65 million years ago - Dinosaurs become extinct, forests get lost underwater and sea creatures die and sink to the bottom. Their decaying remains are recycled into oil, coal and gas. The world is one step ahead of us.

10,000 years ago -People stopped wandering around, hunting things and settled down to grow crops instead. People liked the idea but suddenly realised they had to do something about all their rubbish.

5000 years ago (3000 BC) - In the Cretan capital, Knossos , they dug a great big hole in the ground and chucked their rubbish in it. The world's first recorded landfill.

2000 BC - In China , they made compost out of their gooier rubbish to help their plants grow. At the same time over here, our bronze-aged mates were recycling old bronze scrap into new bronze things. Good for them.

Actually for thousands of years recycling was such a normal thing it wasn't even called recycling, it was just considered dull to discard anything useful, Romans made old building materials into roads.

********************************************************************************

105 AD - Paper is invented in China by Ts'ai Lun.  If any of his paper remains un-recycled…we want to know about it!

220 AD - The first recorded dustmen are the Romans. Teams of two walk down the street grab rubbish and put it in a wagon.

1297AD - Things were going downhill in Britain , it was getting really grubby. The head honcho at the time made a law saying that the front of everyone's house should be rubbish-free. Everyone ignored him. He may have cried, historians aren't sure.

1354 - In London the rubbish was so bad that they employed people to rake it up like leaves once a week. It was all organic too, like rotting food, (and back then everything was green, even the meat), so it was used for compost. Yay!

*********************************************************************************

1407 - Laws were written down and nailed up all over London saying that rubbish had to be kept indoors until those Raking blokes from 1354 could come along and take it to be dumped in the Essex marshes. Unfortunately no one could read so it didn't have much effect.

1500s - Spanish copper mines started recycling scrap iron to help with their mining in a way that's still done today.

1515 - Shakespeare's father was fined for 'depositing filth in a public street' in Stratford-upon-Avon . Go tell your English teacher.

1551 - German paper-maker, Andreas Bernhart, invents packaging by wrapping his paper up in, yes, more paper.

********************************************************************************

1588 - Elizabeth I gets the recycling bug and starts to encourage people to collect old rags for papermaking.  She needed the paper for her list for Santa.

1700s and 1800s - Oops. Being very clever we invented the Industrial Revolution. Starting in the 18th century, we began inventing loads of ways to make loads of things quickly and were very impressed with ourselves for being so modern. It also made much, much more waste. This is where today's problems began.

Of course this wasn't all bad as we recycled too. Many people lived by selling what they could find in other people's rubbish.

People found all sorts of really scummy but recycling-friendly ways to make a living: Toshers' worked in the sewers, a dangerous and smelly job, but lucrative as they found coins, bits of metal, ropes and sometimes jewellery, don't even think about it. 'Mud-larks' scavenged on the riverbanks; no one's too sure why as there was nothing there.

'Dustmen' collected the ash from coal fires, (yep, that's why the dustmen are called dustmen) and men, women and children sieved the bigger bits out, which was used to condition soil and make bricks.

1820 - Thomas Hancock came up with a machine to grind up and recycle scraps of rubber.

1848 - In Britain the, very exciting, Public Health Act 1848 begins the process of waste regulation. Wow! Okay, it was pretty boring, but it did mean that people couldn't just chuck rubbish anywhere.

*********************************************************************************

1869 - The first commercial plastic, celluloid, was developed by a man who made false teeth to replace rhino ivory in billiard balls.

1874 - We started getting energy from waste in Britain ! Hurrah! Huge factories called 'destructors' were built that burnt rubbish to power vast steam engines. Hooray! No one liked them, as they tended to rain smoldering bits of paper all over the neighbourhood, boo! But hundreds were built anyway.

1875 - The Public Health Act 1875. Not exciting sounding these public health acts, are they? Good though, this one said that the council had to come take the rubbish away.

1885 - The first recycling centre is established in New York

*********************************************************************************

1890 - The British Paper Company is created to make paper and board from recycled materials. Waste paper is obtained from organisations such as the Salvation Army and rag-and-bone men.

The late 1800s household waste is collected daily in moveable ashbins. The waste is sorted by hand, usually by women or girls, and the re-usable stuff is plucked out. Loads of it gets reused, the glass, the paper, even the bits of grit and stuff gets put into building materials.

1912 - Jacques Brandenbeger invents Clear plastic, quickly adopted for packaging

1930s - People start making plastics from chemicals produced from petroleum (plastic products had been made from plants since 1862).

1935 - Kreuger's Cream Ale invents the beer can. Nice one, the litter frenzy starts, but at least they're good to recycle.

*********************************************************************************

1939 - What with trying not to get invaded and fighting evil and stuff, people forgot about waste management during World War Two and ended up with huge dumps outside of cities, where sometimes vast tips up to a mile long would burn continuously. But the rubbish was used for fuel in power stations.

1943 - The US government invents the aerosol can.

1948 - Fresh Kills Landfill, what a lovely name, is opened in New York .

1960 - The Duke of Edinburgh has a go at the government about how messy everything is. This leads to the setting up of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

*********************************************************************************

1971 - Friends of the Earth return thousands of bottles to a drinks company. They tell all the newspaper and TV channels they're doing it and suddenly everyone hears about waste management and recycling.

1977 - The first bottle banks appear in Britain

1980 - The first Green Bag Scheme was introduced in Cardiff - Green Bags we love 'em.

1986 - Environmental protection finally gets included in the Treaty of Rome through the Single European Act. Translation: Every country in Europe has to look after the environment, or else!

1994 - The European Union decides anyone who puts packaging on their products has to not use too much and try and recycle more.

*********************************************************************************

1996 - The British Government says 25% of household waste should be recycled by the year 2000.

1997 - Then it says businesses should recover and recycle 38% of their packaging, increasing to 56% by 2001. (Though they only managed 38%)

2002 -Things really start to hot up in Cardiff with the expansion of the wheeled bin scheme…that's right bins with wheels - It currently covers over 17,000 houses in Cardiff…wow what a lot of wheels.

There are three different types of containers for each household; a green wheeled bin, a black-wheeled bin and green bags.  The green-wheeled bin is for green garden waste, such as weeds, general garden cuttings and cardboard.

The green bags are for dry recyclables, such as paper, magazines, aluminium foil, cans, tins (including aerosols), plastic bottles and glass bottles.  All these materials can go can go in the green bag together.

Black bins are for the rest of the household waste; this could include items such as nappies, meat waste, bones and other non-recyclable materials.  Got that…. good…let's move on ...

2003 - A black wheeled bin and green bag recycling scheme was introduced in Plasnewydd in an attempt to make more people recycle and reduce litter in the area. Go Plasnewydd!

A  tri-bag  scheme was introduced to parts of Plasnewydd and Cathays: 1) Black bags for general waste 2) green bags for recyclables and 3) white biodegradable bags for compostable waste (green waste and cardboard).  This scheme covers around 3,000 houses.

 

*********************************************************************************

2004 - Adding new recycling areas has been halted whilst the council makes the Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) at Lamby Way much bigger so it can handle way more recyclables than ever before. Works are expected to finish by the end of 2006.

The green bag scheme now covers over 70,000 houses including the expansion of the wheeled bin and tri-bag schemes - more bins…more wheels…we love it!

April 2004 -Showing that people (like you!) can make a difference - Local authorities across Wales achieved the first target set by The Welsh Assembly Government in its 'Wise about Waste' document by composting and recycling around 16% of municipal waste (compared with a target of 15%).

2005 - The Really Rubbish campaign is launched Hurrah! into ten pilot schools to start with…history is in the making!

2006 -The Really Rubbish Campaign is so successful that it becomes available to all Cardiff Primary Schools launching in January.

Also in January Cardiff Council launches its massive Recycling Roll-out, introduced on a ward-by-ward basis, starting with the Heath Area of the City.  By the end of the programme everyone will be recycling - and that's an awful lot of households!

The big roll-out is made possible by the building of a massive mechanized MRF (Materials Recycling Facility) at Lamby Way which will replace the sorting system which is done by hand.

This all helps Cardiff to achieve the following targets for recycling ...

More Recycled

. 25% of Cardiff 's waste must be recycled or composted by 2006-07
· 40% of Cardiff 's waste must be recycled or composted by 2009-10

Less Landfill

. These targets need to be met as there is too much Biodegradable Municipal Waste (BMW) going into the landfill and it is getting too full.  Sorry about the following load of statistics…but they are important.
· By 2010 we have to reduce the amount of BMW being sent to landfill and we have to continue to reduce waste by more and more as time goes on. If we don't we will have to pay huge fines and Planet Earth will not like us!

Phew…enough of history!  Check out the rest of the website to find out how you can start making recycling history today.