Litter and Recycling Plastic - How To Learn From Other Countries And The Past

 Recycling bin with clear labels for households in Singapore showing what can be recycled using this bin and what can't. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

One problem easily solved is that you need two adjacent bins with one slot for plastic or glass bottles and another for different rubbish. It could be done like coin machines. Make bottles in four sizes and have round or square holes the size for each bottle. Adjacent and attached (although perhaps detachable?) is another bin with letter box style slits for plastic bags. You could even make the bins look like bottles and bags. I've stood in foreign airports trying to read the list of what goes in which bin and been baffled. You also need a drain in which you can empty the contents, the liquid dregs of the bottle.

COLOURS
As for colour schemes, there's no international standard and it's counter-intuitive. In Harrow in NW London, green which you would think would be the friendly recycling bin is for non-recycling. Blue is for recycling.

If you drop the item in the wrong bin, the only way to retrieve it is to reach inside a dirty bin getting your sleeves dirty. However, you can't reach the bottom because it's longer than your arm. So then you have to empty the entire mess onto the drive. Ten minutes wasted.

You can spend a minute an item looking for the recycling symbol and then you get an ambiguous message, recyclable in some areas. Most people don't know there are several symbols for types of plastic. It would be simpler if plastic packaging had numbers and colours as well.

SHAPES
You could also print wrapping paper with an amusing recycling symbol or background stripes, dots and diagonals. Alternatively, or to save confusion, a coloured frame with wavy edges, to save having to hunt for instructions on the corners or guess.

Bins could cary the message, this bin recycles red circle symbol packages. This packaging is blue triangle two. This box for green tree three. Then even a foreigner or a child or a person with Alzheimers can see to match the blue or blue dot package with the blue bin and the green tree symbol with the green tree bin.

The bin itself can be designed in the shape of a bottle or tree. That's been done with animals shapes and even sounds like barking and thanking you to encourage children to feed litter into bins.

This was done successfully in the UK in the nineteen fifties and / or sixties.

You can also give pocket money to children, make the unemployed work for their money, give money to the homeless, but giving money back on returned bottles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-

Article on success of Norwegian system of deposits on bottles.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and phtographer, author and speaker.