NERC in the News
Recycling an Olympian effort at London Games
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USA Today, Sports London, July 4, 2012
LONDON - If Olympics officials have their way, trash sorting will join running, jumping and throwing as one of the main events at the 2012 Games.
Spectators at the Olympic venues will be bombarded with messages to sort their trash into the right containers. Sports fans will be exhorted to recycle by signs on vending machines, posters in food-sales areas, announcements over the loud speakers and messages flashed on the big screens inside the venues, as well as printed information included with all tickets. Staff members will be stationed at some trash areas to help people confused about the difference between "compost" and "recycling."
The all-enveloping propaganda is needed to help Games organizers meet their goal of recycling or composting 70% of the trash from spectators, a rate that is considered extremely ambitious for an event that is the world's biggest logistical exercise outside of a war.
MORE: See what's going on 'Inside London' Seventy percent is a "massively high" rate, says David Stubbs, sustainability director for the Games, adding that big events in Britain typically recycle 15% of their waste, while the best achieve a recycling rate of roughly 30%.
To help meet the recycling goal, every company providing food at the Games must use compostable plates, cutlery and food packaging. Among the few food items on sale in the park that don't have a compostable wrapper are the candy bars manufactured by one of the Olympic sponsors.
Food packaging will be marked with colored labels corresponding to the color of the container it should be thrown in: bright orange for food and compostable materials, lime-green for bottles and cans and black for non-recyclable items.
At first glance, it seems reasonable to think spectators will comply. Most Britons recycle at home, and many London neighborhoods even collect food scraps to be made into garden compost. Any doubts that Brits can cooperate en masse with Olympic organizers' requests vanished this week, when tens of thousands of people who'd watched a dress rehearsal of the opening ceremony kept the details to themselves.
But it won't be as gratifying to sort the garbage as to "save the secret," as the rehearsal audience was urged, and spectators at sporting events have an unenviable recycling record.
"When they're done with their hot-dog wrapper, people really want to just get it out of their hand quickly," says Julie Bryant of San Francisco's Department of the Environment. "So they just toss it, and frequently that means tossing it in the wrong place."
Bryant says that 87% of garbage at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, home of the 49ers football team, is recycled, but that rate is achievable only by employing people to stand by some of the waste stations and help fans sort their trash. Behind the scenes, a separate team of workers hand-sorts the trash and recyclables to makes sure nothing's in the wrong place.
The contents of the bins at the Olympics also will be sorted after disposal, Stubbs says, to ensure the Games meet their recycling targets. A quick scan of the bins in the Olympic Park before the Games begin show the need for hand-sorting. There are compostable cups in the recycling bins, banana peels in the non-recyclables bins and recyclable bottles in the compost bins.
Behind-the-scenes sorting can help achieve a challenging recycling target, but there's a far better way to do so, says Athena Lee Bradley of the Northeastern Recycling Council, which promotes recycling in the northeastern U.S. states. Staffing of all recycling stations, she says, can lead to 100% recycling - and without the need for sorting afterward.
Even if discarded items are sorted later, a lot of recyclable items have to be thrown away because they've been contaminated with food, she says.
"You're going to have food waste all over everything, and that's not a good way to do it," she says. Not to mention that "it's really disgusting to go through people's trash."
