Recycling for our future

Like most teenagers, I anticipate being around for a while and you’ll know from previous blogs that I’m concerned about waste disposal and recycling, writes our Teen Blogger Rhian.

n the one hand, big manufacturers have engineered a “throwaway” society where replacing something is easier and cheaper than getting it repaired, but on the other hand, we’re fast running out of spaces to dump all the techno junk, worse still, it generates a lot of peripheral waste which is poisonous to the environment.

Take batteries for example. It’s been estimated that we use about 900 million batteries a year, just in the UK, but only two per cent are recycled. That’s awful. Think of all those batteries quietly rotting away in landfill sites, and all those poisons slowly finding their way into the water table for the foreseeable future. Yuk!

Think back also to the Christmas shopping frenzy. The adult market sold a fair few razors and cameras, but the bulk of battery operated items sold were probably in the form of children’s toys. The poblem is though, that children want these interactive, dynamic toys.

But there is hope. New technology may soon be able to provide such things, but without batteries (which is good news for parental finances too.) At the London Toy Fair next month, a small manufacturer calling itself “Ecotronic Toys” will unveil a range of electronic toys that don’t require batteries.

I wish them every success and I hope they’re not gobbled up and shut down by some greedy toy manufacturing giant, because our environment needs this sort of initiative.

Rhian is the Shropshire Star’s Teen Blogger, commenting on a wide range of issues from a teenager’s point of view.