A recent report posted on the Wall Street Journal shows some disturbing, in an environmental point of view, tendencies that are to affect the global trend of recycling in the year to come. According to statistics large corporations in the United Kingdom have began to overlook their responsibilities concerning recycling. This has been happening in the past several months, or even the past year, but the attention of specialists has been drawn to the issue just now.
The reason is not some evil plot about the destruction of nature. Those big-shot companies, as always, have been operating in such a manner because of financial reasons. The current conditions in the Middle East, paired with a number of global policies set out by the world economic powers led to a considerable decrease in the oil prices around the globe. Thus, the main incentives for corporations to stimulate recycling in their daily production process – reusing old resources instead of investing into producing new ones – have disappeared. One may say that the current situation is a typical example of how geopolitics and global economy directly influences trends and processes that we have began to think of as a given in our everyday lives. Everyone knows that recycling is crucial for sustaining the balance in nature, but once keeping this balance becomes less profitable for the industry, everyone forgets about it – this leads to the picture described in the Wall Street Journal article, of a former WWII bomber hanger in Binbrook, which is now owned by CK Group. The hanger is overflowed with hundreds of bags of shredded plastic, which just a couple of years ago would have already been recycled several times.
The CK Group specializes in recycling, and actually no one can blame the company about the current state of affairs at their hanger. As a representative of theirs explains, everyone in the business does whatever is possible to stay afloat. But the cheap oil creates a great possibility that the rate of recycling would decrease more and more in the months to come. This is bad news for all recycling companies not only in the UK, but around the world too – the effect has been felt also in the United States already. What is even worse is the fact that this is also going to lead to a major setback in the fight against pollution. Because, as we all very well know, recycling is the key to keeping the environment safe.
Now, the oil prices are unlikely to cause the ordinary households in Britain and the US to change their waste collection and junk clearance habits. People who have recycled in the past are going to continue doing this in the future. The problem is that household waste is just a tiny proportion of the waste responsible for pollution. Big industrial companies are the ones doing most of the damage, and what we should hope for is that a satisfactory solution to the problem is found for both sides – the CEOs and nature.