Recycling: The Snowball Effect

Good morning!

As part of a re-vamp for my blog I'm going to be doing a series on different aspects of recycling - some of the topics will include unusual things you didn't know you could recycle, where your recycling goes and todays' topic: the snowball effect.

Lately I've become a huge fan of The Simple Dollar, a personal finance blog written by a guy in America. He's got tons of great ideas on frugality, ways to cut down on bills, free activities to do etc. and I really reccommend it to people looking for some fun ways to cut back. :)

Recently I read his blog The Snowball Effect: How Little Moves Can Create Huge Effects Later (he's a fan of long titles!) all about how a habit that saves a small amount of money when done regularly can add up to a large amount of money in the long run. It's a concept I think about often but struggle to convince others of, so I was really happy to find a blog that showed just how big a difference it could make. I got thinking on how I could relate this to other areas and did some number crunching of my own to relate it to recycling. I've focused just on plastic water bottles so it's easy to demonstrate.

Tom takes 2 plastic bottles of water to work with him every day and he works 4 days a week. That comes to 400 empty plastic bottles going to landfill or 7.6kg every year if you don't recycle.

We try to re-use the bottles where we can - some are put in the fridge/freezer to make them more efficient, others I re-use myself as I'm fine with tap water. One or two are used to make the toilet flush more efficiently.

Tom regularly asks me what's the point when I'm trying to save just a few bottles, so to save you asking here is the point:

I save approximately 50 bottles from various re-use ideas a year. That's 950g of plastic - 1/8th of our yearly use.

950g isn't very much you might argue, but lets look at it on a national scale. There are 25 million homes in Britain, so let's make a low estimate that 10% of those homes have a similar bottle usage to us:
That's 2.5 million homes throwing out 19,000 metric tonnes of plastic a year. If each of them could save just 950g a year, as a nation we'd be saving 2375 tonnes. That's a bit more impressive isn't it!

To look at it from just our personal perspective is very narrow minded - when I find a new use for a bottle I'm not thinking "Great, I've just saved 19g from landfill." I'm thinking of all the bottles I'll save in the same way for the rest of my life. If I save 1 bottle from landfill a month I will save 720 bottles in my lifetime (assuming I live to the average life expectancy of 82). If I continued re-using at my current rate and never found another use for a bottle again, I would save 3000 bottles or 57kg of plastic. That's almost my own body-weight in plastic.

That is the point.