‘The fact that we’re still having to attend meetings – four years down the track – is just a disgrace. It is so depressing,’ says one local
At times, the stench has roused Nicole Power from her sleep. The St Albans resident likens it to the smell of burning chemicals.
“It get rights down in my throat,” she said.
Continue reading...People will be able to claim back €6-€25 of cost of repairing clothes and shoes in latest environmental measure
A broken heel, a rip in trousers, buttons missing from a shirt? Don’t throw them away if you live in France, where the government will pay a “repair bonus” to have them mended in a new scheme aimed at cutting waste.
An estimated 700,000 tonnes of clothing is thrown away in France every year, two-thirds ending up in landfill.
Continue reading...With 100 tonnes of clothing from the west discarded every day in Accra, ‘fast fashion’ brands must be forced to help pay for the choking textile waste they create, environmentalists say
A group of secondhand clothes dealers from Ghana have visited Brussels to lobby for Europe-wide legislation to compel the fashion industry to help address the “environmental catastrophe” of dumping vast amounts of textiles in the west African country.
The traders from Kantamanto in Accra, one of the world’s largest secondhand clothing markets, met Alice Bah Kuhnke, an MEP with Sweden’s Green party, environmental organisations and representatives from the European Commission and the European Environment Bureau to argue that proposed extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulation should ensure Ghana receives funds towards managing the 100 tonnes of clothing discarded at the market every day.
Continue reading...Gesture announced at Copenhagen sustainability summit earns praise – and some cries of ‘greenwashing’
Chinese fashion behemoth Shein might be the organisation least expected to win applause at an international conference on fashion sustainability, but that’s what happened at this week’s global fashion summit in Copenhagen.
The industry’s largest forum for sustainable progress saw the ultra-fast fashion brand praised for making a donation of $15m (£12m) over three years to a charity working at Kantamanto in Accra, the world’s largest secondhand clothing market.
Liz Ricketts, director of the Or Foundation, a Ghana- and US-based not-for-profit working with Accra’s textile waste workers, announced the fund, tearfully telling the audience that the workers are doing “backbreaking” work.
National Audit Office says tax has increased amount of money criminals can make from waste crime
Organised criminals have accidentally been given incentives by the government to fly-tip, a damning report by the National Audit Office has found.
Fly-tipping has increased year-on-year in England since 2012-13 and reached 1.13 million recorded incidents in 2020-21 – at a cost of £11.6m to clear large-scale incidents.
Continue reading...For miles around Walleys Quarry in Silverdale, people have reported waking up in the night struggling to breathe
It may have been labelled the country’s smelliest village but it is much more than a bad stench making life miserable for the residents of Silverdale in Staffordshire.
For miles around Walleys Quarry landfill near Newcastle-under-Lyme, people have reported waking up in the middle of the night struggling to breathe, with itchy eyes and sore throats. Those with asthma have had their medication increased, and some have reported nosebleeds.
Continue reading...Fifteen years ago, all the Slovenian capital’s waste went to landfill, but by 2025, at least 75% of its rubbish will be recycled. How did the city turn itself around?
Words and photographs by Luka Dakskobler
From the lush green hill you can see Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in the distance. Populations of deer, rabbits and turtles live here. The air is clean and the only signs that we are standing above a 24-metre (79 feet) deep landfill are the methane gas pipes rising from the grass.
Ljubljana is the first European capital to commit to going zero-waste. But fifteen years ago, all of its refuse went straight to landfill. “And that is expensive,” says Nina Sankovič of Voka Snaga, the city’s waste management company. “It takes up space and you’re throwing away resources.”
Continue reading...Most concrete from demolished buildings is simply dumped, much of it illegally. But there’s a better way – and it involves lightning
At the Shenzhen dump, huge shards of dusty concrete lie in imposing piles. Once the very foundation of this Chinese city, these blocks now seem grotesque in their magnitude, and unsettling in their utter uselessness. Jumbled up with the other relics of modern construction – bricks, wood and steel – and dotted with plastic bags and bottles, it could take centuries, even millennia, for Shenzhen’s discarded concrete to disintegrate back into sand.
China produces more construction waste than any other country - around 2 billion tonnes per year (pdf), or around 4kg per person per day. Two million tonnes of this is concrete. In Shenzhen, which has grown from a town with 30,000 residents to a megacity with 11 million in just 35 years, a full 84% of that construction waste is unceremoniously dumped. It doesn’t even all make its way to official landfills, which don’t have the capacity to handle it, so almost half is disposed in unlicensed sites, or illegally tipped.
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