AAA White Paper The political economy of informal events, 2030 | Page 78

So waste from informal events, and especially plastics waste,
is absolutely negligible compared with the waste that the UK
generates, year-round, from all sources. While the detritus left
after, say, a music festival can be a real pain at a local level, it’s
hardly a national menace.
Still: how should informal events deal with that detritus? Take
plastics. With that material, it might be easy for event organisers
to signal virtue by banning single-use plastic bottles, adopting the
United Nations Environment’s Global Plastics Platform, backed by
the elite World Economic Forum (WEF, Davos), or teaming up with
WEF, Coke, Pepsi and Dow Chemical in the Global Plastic Action
Partnership. But wiser and more practical, for 2030, would be to see
how new technology might deal with waste. In Pakistan, scientists
Chart 19
have found that the enzymes associated with certain fungi can digest
Source: DEFRA,
plastics waste. Similarly, UK and US scientists have engineered an
UK statistics on waste,
enzyme – an aromatic polyesterase – to digest PET, the chief material
14 February 2019
for single-use plastics bottles and the like, as well as PEF, a newish
plastic now used as a substitute
for PET.
Different kinds of waste generated
True, these biochemical
techniques may prove hard to
annually in the UK, by source, millions
commercialise. Such a snag may
of tonnes, 2016/7
also apply to robots collecting
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litter; and, while it’s admirable
66.2
that a French theme park has
60
trained six crows to pick up
cigarette butts and other small
50
pieces of rubbish, that example
may not provide event organisers
with the kind of mass collection
40
41.1
technique that the big events of
the future will require.
30
Yet
bold
technological
26.9
approaches seem to us more
20
pragmatic
than
endless
moralising to event-goers about
10
11.5
their environmental misdeeds
at events. And until cheap waste
2.26
technologies arrive, there’s
another, very simple fix that
improve matters: feature more
litter bins on every site – bins that
are cleared frequently enough for
them not to overflow.
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