In recent years, waste management in Catalan cities has improved a lot. We have examples of good practices that are in our country and around the world. Collection and facilities for separation and treatment are, in some cases, of the highest quality. We do more and more, but we never finish. The better we do it, the more work we have to do. We have indicators for everything, and we almost always find the right ones to reflect efforts and improvements. But, on the other hand, the problem of waste, its emissions and the lack of resources remains to be resolved. What should we do?
Everything we consume ends up becoming waste. Daily dozens and hundreds of trucks enter a city (the transport of goods by train is testimonial in our country, and by metro, non-existent) full of products; of any type. Well, the equation is simple: so many tons of products exist, so many tons of waste will end up being generated. But just as there is a complex logistics for the distribution of products, with regard to waste we think they all fit in various containers and several trucks that will pick them up when it doesn’t bother us. Where is the Amazon of waste? I don’t see discounts on waste anywhere. The law of discounts (of waste) is yet to be written. The challenge we have is how we make something simple and simple fashionable and beautiful: saving. If we consume less, we will need fewer resources and we will generate fewer emissions.
We drag an erratic approach in the management of packaging. we were wrong: the model of the yellow container and the green container is out of stock. They represent a bubble (as was the housing bubble at the time) that must be punctured as soon as possible. Now it’s time to save and reuse. We can talk, for example, about glass, but it doesn’t make any sense to put a glass bottle in a green container and have it crumble, for later invest expensive and dirty energy and make a new bottle darker glass. It is useless to pile up the plastics and then try to separate them, and when we do not succeed, burn them or take them far away. The challenge is how we return to the previous model of packaging reuse. Cities don’t know how to stop and simply say ‘enough!’ Let’s start again, and that all containers, the minimum possible, are reusable. Neither plastic bags nor non-reusable containers.
The excessive consumption of food does not let us see the tons of food wasted; neither is the lack of time to grow our own food, shop, prepare and cook the recipes we like the most and wash the dishes. We don’t have time, or we don’t dedicate the time that would be desirable, to something as basic as our diet. The challenge is to try produce sustainably and locally part of our food, with resources from the city itself to supply what we need.
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Save and reuse also in the fractions that fill closets and homes: textile and electronic utensils. How many clothes remain in the closets that we do not use frequently; how many electrical and electronic devices die without ever having repaired them. We are using too many resources in these two sectors. To do it better, the challenge is how to introduce sustainable ecodesign in these sectors that have such an impact on our economy and on waste management.
We have knowledge and examples. Now it’s time to put them into practice.