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Question 11
Why can’t I recycle all my plastic?
Steve Jones: Cold hard economics is the answer. It's not financially viable unless it can be done on a big scale. There is however a lot more recycling going on within industry or places like supermarket warehouses, where you get a lot of the same kind of plastic in one place. In those circumstances it can be very efficient and cost effective to recycle it.
Question 12
What’s the most creative green idea you’ve ever come across?
Steve Jones: Permaculture design. It is design approach, modelled on natural systems aimed at making things productive, efficient and sustainable.
If that’s a cheat to answer with a whole design approach, then a favourite is the idea of utility leasing rather than consuming. Simple example: when you buy a car, what you actually want to buy is mobility, not two tonnes of steel. It's just that the company persuades us that in order to be mobile we have to buy this machine which we don’t actually know how to fix ourselves. So the idea is what you buy from Ford or whoever is mobility, not the car but the utility that it offers. So as soon as it breaks down, it returns to Ford to fix or recycle as it is no longer providing that mobility - it's just a hunk of metal.
As individuals we are not equipped to fix and recycle things like cars or washing machines but the manufacturers are. If consumer items remain the responsibility of the manufacturer, it would force them to redesign things to make them more durable and much easier to recycle.
For a really simple answer, how about car sharing... we could halve traffic in one day if we really wanted to.
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