2023-05-28 16:00:00
Question from Yves: Who invented container parks? We owe him a big debt!
The question seems simple at first glance, but the answer is not so easy to find. Container parks, called recyparcs since 2004, because everything that is brought there is recycled, celebrate their 31st anniversary in Belgium in 2023. ” Before, some municipalities had container parks managed by municipal workers“explains Jean-Jacques de Paoli, at Intradel.
Container parks were created in 1992 and glass bubbles in 1982. Before that, waste management was simply a bubble. “In 1992, when Guy Lutgen launched the recycling parks, we had 10 types of waste. Today we are over 30” dit Ingrid Bertrand, porte-parole du BEP. In 2022, we moved to a collection of 491 kg of waste per year per inhabitant.”
Recycling in the 20th century
The catalog of the “Throw” exhibition, at the house of european history, explains that following the Second World War, the production of waste was considered as a kind of sign of prosperity. Then, a movement of recycling activists appeared in the United States in the 1960s. In Europe, the world of industry and the political world came to an agreement “recycling was the best way to deal with the increasing amounts of waste. “
The first waste taken care of was glass, but also paper, which occupied a large part of our bins. The paper was collected from us by associations like Terre to finance through the sale.
While waste management legislation emerged in the 1970s, little change took place before the 1990s. because of the almost total absence of markets for the sale of recycled products, contrary to what existed in the 19th century. In addition, these secondary raw materials and the energy produced would compete with conventional natural resources and energy sources, the extraction of which would be cheaper than that of energy from recycling.
In short, if recycling has taken so long to set up in a structured way, it is both because of the cost of collection, but also of the cost of reusing materials, because of the virtual absence total number of markets for the sale of recycled products, unlike what still existed in the 19th century. “This required not only the organization of the sorting and processing plant, but a complete reorganization of the collection service“.
In addition, these secondary raw materials and the energy produced would compete with conventional natural resources and energy sources, the extraction of which would be cheaper than that of energy from recycling, explains the catalog of ” Discard”.
But let’s not forget that the best way to reduce our waste is to consume less.
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