Recycling Going green is not a throwaway idea
Your black plastic recycling box is 25 years old about now, and Bristol is recycling a lot more of its domestic waste than it used to. Eugene Byrne, our man who always puts the wrong things in the wrong bins, looks back on how Bristol discovered recycling
IF there’s anyone else in the room with you while you’re reading this, hit them with this quiz question:
Which very simple (and not at all technological) object does almost every household in Bristol use nowadays and which very few had until 25 years ago?
If they demand a clue, tell them that most homes in the UK have one now, but Bristol’s arrived in significant numbers in the summer and autumn of 1997.
The answer – which of course you know, don’t you? – the black recycling box.
Bristol like to think itself as something of a leader in sustainability and all things ‘green,’ and whatever our actual achievements might be, many have been talking the environmentalist talk for a long time.
If you go back to the 1960s you might argue that the campaigns to save the docks and prevent massive road-building and other inappropriate developments were environmentalist in nature.
By the early 1970s Bristol had the first branch of Friends of the Earth (FoE) outside London and its first campaign was against non-returnable bottles from Schweppes. Activists collected and left 500 bottles on the doorstep at Schweppes’ offices in Brislington.
Soon they were working with schoolchildren on pollution and campaigning against the Outer Circuit Road, and the poor state of the city’s public transport, calling for bus and train travel to be free so that people would use their cars less.
Many of FoE’s most active members were university students and lecturers and many in mainstream Bristol regarded them as hippies, eccentrics and cranks, but the movement grew. One of FoE’s Bristol founders, Alastair Sawday, would later become well-known as a publisher of sustainable travel books.
Avon FoE set up a separate arm, Resourcesaver, which by the late 1970s was running kerbside collections around various parts of town to take waste materials and recycle them. At one point in the 1980s some of these collections were carried out, Steptoe & Son-style, using a horse-drawn cart.
Other initiatives followed. The Children’s Scrapstore was set up to provide materials for craft activities using unwanted materials under the slogan ‘making waste things playthings.’
Bristol would also become home to Sustrans, whose earliest big achievement was turning the old rail line between Bristol and Bath into a cycle path and which would go on to map out an entire national network of cycle (and pedestrian) friendly routes. There have been many other recycling/re-use initiatives, too, such as the SOFA project.
If some irritable correspondents on the Post’s letters pages scorned their more environmentally-conscious fellow citizens, especially the militant cyclists, there were plenty who deplored waste. The biggest issue, as FoE had spotted from the start, was glass.
Everyone hated the way that they were supposed to throw used bottles out. Even in the 1970s, pub landlords and restaurateurs were complaining of the waste. In 1975 the landlord of the Black Swan in Westbury-on-Trym reckoned he had 6,000 bottles behind his pub as he couldn’t stand the idea of throwing them away.
By the 1990s, pressure was growing for Bristol to waste less, though much of this was now coming from central government. By the time the black box scheme was rolled out in 1997 everyone knew what recycling was. The council was running kerbside collections of old newspaper in some parts of town, and some of us showed willing by taking the empties to bottle banks in supermarket car parks.
Bristol City Council’s scheme to deliver 40,000 black boxes (all made of recycled plastic, of course) was the start of recycling in Bristol on a truly large scale.
This was not just down to the council’s concern for the environment which, after all, was not as high on the agenda as it is nowadays.
The initiative was down to the fact that someone in Whitehall had realised that if we carried on the way we were going, more densely populated parts of country would no longer have enough capacity for landfill. Sticks and carrots were produced to get councils to send less of their garbage to holes in the ground.
The black boxes were originally intended for newspapers and magazines, shoes, glass bottles and jars, tin cans and used engine oil. They would be collected fortnightly and the scheme was run by the council in partnership with the city’s refuse contractors, SITA, along with Resourcesaver, who were, after all, the experts.
Bristol boasted that the scheme was the biggest in the country,
which at the time it probably was, though it certainly wasn’t the first. Something similar had been running in Bath for two years already.
And 40,000 boxes certainly did not equate to the actual number of households in Bristol. At the time there were more like 130,000 households if you included flats.
The scheme started with those areas where kerbside collections would be easiest: the leafy suburbs with wide roads.
But it worked, probably better than many at the Council House had expected, and by early the following year the scheme had been more than doubled in size. Highrise flats in areas such as Hartcliffe
and Lawrence Hill, where black boxes were thought impractical, got communal bins for glass and paper instead.
We’ve moved on a great deal since then. The early noughties would see an ambitious and mostly successful series of new recycling initiatives. In addition to our wheelie bins and black boxes, we now have green boxes, brown boxes and blue bags and, for those prepared to pay for them, green wheelie bins.
In 1997, only 6% of Bristol’s household waste was recycled. Nowadays it’s about half. A great achievement or still not nearly enough? You decide.