Waste Watchers

Comm: "Why pay more if it costs less to recycle? Why buy leather if rubber will do? Keep watching to discover 'hands on' ways to cut waste and earn some extra money doing something useful for the environment.

Pulp Friction, Italy

Comm: "Venice.

"The pearl of the Adriatic. Fragile tourist haven.

"The
paper factory near venice - fragile eco-system.

"Much of the time clogged by thousands of tons of excess algae - which cuts oxygen levels, kills fish - and makes an awful stink.

"A huge disposal problem.

"Until someone had a bright idea. Turn it into paper. Clemente Nicolucci, scientist and environmental prophet, heads the project.

"Marnie Campagnaro is his assistant and translator."

Clemente Nicolucci: "What we did is try to substitute the vegetable fibre from trees by using seaweed and as we love trees we find a way to use seaweed as a new raw material."

Comm: "Nicolucci is head of eco-environmental research at a paper factory near Venice."

"The algae must be dried straight after collection to stop the biological changes that would lead to rotting - and smelling.

"The Eco-Favini range of papers was launched in 1991 alongside its conventional brands.

"Nicolucci's algae paper appeared shortly afterwards.

"The chemical free-drying and milling process breaks down the algae into 'algae flour' - which is then mixed with recycled paper and cellulose from wood. Even this wood content comes mainly from waste sawdust.

"The 50,000 tons of algae collected most years saves 30,000 tons of living trees.

"Algae flour is added to pulp at the beginning of the process.

"Conventional paper-making is a big consumer of trees, water and energy - several tons of trees to make one ton of paper. Here it's much less.

"And the energy used to turn algae into cellulose is only half that needed to transform wood.

"For every working day of the mill, 20 trees and 40 full tanks of petrol are saved."

Marnie Campagnaro: "Here this is the result this is the final product the paper that you will buy in the future."

Comm: "Here's the finished product

"The paper is acid free, chlorine free, long lasting and totally recyclable.

"Favini, which encourages Nicolucci's innovations, has a company policy that any savings made through green investment must be reinvested in ecology.

"Favini makes less than 1% of all Italy's paper output. There's still a long way to go.

"But Nicolucci has more ideas. Algae paper is only the beginning. For him the world's waste isn't a problem - it's a challenge.

"Favini makes maize paper, orange and lemon paper, wine paper, sugar beet paper and more - all made from other people's left-overs."

Clemente Nicolucci: "He believed that vegetable waste and industrial pollutants will be the new raw material of the future not only the paper sector but in general industries."

Comm: "Different flours made from waste ingredients are added at the start of the process to supplement, or even completely replace, wood cellulose.

"Nicolucci sees a future where he can use practically any rubbish to make paper.

"Most of Nicolucci's innovations are unique to the Favini mill.

"But there's only one Nicolucci. To spread the word far and wide, perhaps he should clone himself.

"His system also saves water. Lots of it.

"Cleaning and recycling the factory's waste water has cut water consumption by over/more than 50%.

"Skimming off the scum saves enough water each year for a town of 7000 people.

"And there's only one thing Nicolucci could possibly think of doing with the sludge that's left.

"Nicolucci can make paper out of almost anything. High quality with its own distinct look and feel.

"But what is his proudest achievement?

Clemente Nicolucci: "The fact that we managed to produce good products, environmentally friendly without using chemicals."

Comm: "Nicolucci is helping to clean up the Venice lagoon. But his vision goes way beyond even that.

"Today Nicolucci is saving Venice. His ideas may spread much further in the future."

Story 2: Inner Style, UK

Comm: "This is the tale of a company called Inner Tube.

"Julie McDonagh, owner and designer.

"Helen Clinch, designer.

"Stef Skillcorn, machinist.

"Dee Farwell, accountant and business advisor.

"And Lisa Hodgson - part time designer - away on holiday.

"Inner Tube needs inner tubes. Every two weeks Helen and Stef pick up a bucketful of old ones free of charge from local garages. They're delighted to see the back of them.

"Julie McDonagh came up with a use for old inner tubes during a recycling project at university.

Julie McDonagh: "I was looking at things that needed recycling in the UK lots of other students were using things like crisp packets and cans, lots of things that were already being recycled, but I was looking at something that wasn't."

Comm: "Julie's bright idea was to turn old inner tubes into stylish handbags.

"Stef cuts up the tubes into manageable pieces depending on the size of the bag.

"Then the rubber is pressed and holes and other design features are added.

"But that's done miles away - so here's one they prepared earlier.

Julie McDonagh: "I found out that 70% of inner tubes are burnt or buried in the UK, I then visited Egypt and saw Egyptians locals making these water carriers from inner tubes , so as soon as I got back to the UK I went around the garages collecting lots of inner tubers and they thought I was a nutter whatever are you going to do with these smelly, dirty inner tubes.

"But I carried on collecting them, cleaning them, making sculptures for my university project and a friend asked me to put a zip in one and that was where it all began and where my first handbag came from."

Comm: "Stef makes eight handbags a day. Demand has increased enormously since Julie designed her first ones.

"Since that early undergraduate idea hit Julie, her designs have gone though many changes.

"Her first handbags were based on forms taken from nature - including plants she drew at Kew Gardens in London.

Julie McDonagh: "This is called plant pod rucksack. It's made from completely recycled materials. Even the strap is made from car seat belts."

"The wacky and outrageous handbags aimed at teenager boutiques now stand alongside bags made for the mass market."

Julie McDonagh: "I think I've established now there's a huge gap in the market for recycled rubber inner tube products, we've started to design cd covers, mobile phone covers, vases, interiors basically the sky's the limit now."

Comm: "Inner Tube now sub-contracts work to China, where they use off-cuts from Stef at base - so there's no waste at all.

"Handbags have come a long way since Margaret Thatcher."

Story 3: Waste Busters, Karachi, Pakistan

Comm: "Forests of plastic-bag trees decorate landfill sites around the world. These trees are just outside the city of Karachi in Pakistan

"From less than half a million fifty years ago, Karachi has exploded into ten million people who generate 7000 tons of rubbish every day.

"The Karachi Municipal Council, responsible for rubbish collection and disposal, just can't cope."

Tasneem Siddiqui, Govt of Sindh: "The services are not enough. They're not properly managed. They're not properly supervised. As a result, on average our municipal services are able to remove only fifty per cent of solid waste from the streets. There has to be private/public partnership in solid waste management.

"Waste Busters is a private entrepreneur and they have produced good results. So we asked them to come to Karachi and sit with us and take one area and show us on a pilot basis how sucessful they can be."

Anjum Parvez, Waste Busters: "Well Waste Busters started in Lahore about three years ago and it is quite successful over there now I mean after three years of hard work we have almost twelve to fifteen thousand households.

"In Karachi the idea is pretty new to the municipality when we approached them and we do need their support before we start something like that.

"I have people who drive a van and then someone who collects door to door and then they bring it back to the transfer station where we sort out the rubbish, and then we take it for recycling.We make bales out of plastic bags like you see there, and they're all compacted together and then put into trucks and carted away."

Comm: "Not only is rubbish being recycled into useful things. Collecting it creates jobs in a city where work is scarce.

Tasneem Siddiqui: "We do not exclude for example the scavengers - they have a role to play and we find that about 40,000 people they are involved in this recycling business and scavenging. But we don't want to displace them."

Anjum Parvez, Waste Busters: "This is a middle to upper class neighbourhood. The size of the houses is quite big."

"That sector or that part of the city was allocated to us saying - OK you can start from there and they were the first ones to give us the support we need from the municipality and so that's where we started."

Mother and Son: "I think they should be expanding their operations and I think if they expand it, the whole city will cooperate."

Anjum Parvez, Waste Busters: "We cannot charge much because we really feel that the money we should make should be out of what we collect and the user fee shouldn't be very high. We charge a hundred rupees a month and that sort of barely covers the cost of the bags we give them. We are taking a loss every month but we're hoping that with the membership increasing, with more corporate support, with people becoming more aware as a result of our educating them, then we'll have more members and it will become sustainable."

Story 4: Cashing In, Norway

Comm: "There are roughly 700 billion containers currently in circulation around the world. And, as demand for drinks increases, so do the mountains of plastic cartons, cans and bottles. In Europe less than 20% of containers are recycled. Indeed, the word itself is often misunderstood.

Morthen Johannessen: "In our definition recycling has to be part of a closed loop where it all starts with collection of the containers getting it back and then the whole processing down the value chain so to speak then hopefully being able to use that material in manufacturing and new container again."

Comm: "In Norway 90% of containers are returned to supermarkets so they can be
re-used, refilled or turned into something else. Hands On finds out what makes the Norwegians so eco-friendly.

"Erling Lyche and his daughters knock back their drinks at the family home in the suburbs of Oslo.

Erling Lyche: "I would say we go through 5, 6, 7 bottles of coke and the same amount in cans and bottles and after we've emptied them we put them in our basket and leave it in the kitchen until its full and when its full I have my daughters sort them out.

."Every now and again we give the money to them so they are very keen on making sure they are all empty even those that are half empty they tend to pour out to get their own kroner so we have to keep an eye on them.

"Only in the last five to six years since we began to realise how much we could earn. 120 kroners a week is about 20 Dollars. By taking it to the shop you really see that you get your money back if you take it somewhere else you wouldn't bother.

"Not many go back to the liquor store to take wine bottles back that really shows the efficiency of having the deposit machines."

Comm: "Located at the supermarket entrance the TOMRA reverse vending machine makes life easy for customer and storeowner. Bottles go in and the machine spits a coupon back out. This can then be cashed in for money or a discount."

Erling Lyche: "Today we have 44 kroners this was a nice deductible so today's shopping was quite cheap."

Comm: "The Tomra machine may look simple. But high tech 3D image recognition technology ensures the customer gets back the right money. At the Tomra factory they spend hours checking the equipment."

Terje Hanserud, Tomra: "In this area we assemble some of the most critical part in the laser scanning equipment the 3 dimensional recognition of crates and refillable bottles so we have to identify each item to give our customers that exist on the market they may have a different deposit attached to them some of them may be non deposit and we have to identify each item to give our customers the right refund back automatically.

"You can see also how the imaging system works this is the picture that the machine sees but it sees it with a much higher resolution and it also it sees 25 pictures every second so this is used then for identifying exactly what kind of bottles or other objects are fed through the machine."

Comm: "Tomra customises the machine for different uses."

Terje Hanserud, Tomra: "Here's an example of a very small backroom installation only a simple collection table the bottles are just collected here for sorting into crates afterwards.

"Behind me you can see more advance backroom systems where bottles are sorted and put automatically into crates. Empty crates are fed automatically into the system.

"Here we see the backside of a canning machine. And the cans are going through and are compacted and that is better for the store."

Comm: "But if Tomra technology is going to be take off every part of the recycling chain has to be involved."

Morthen Johannessen: "This is not about consumers willingness the consumers around the world are more than willing to go; it's up to the other players the retailers, the beverage industry and some sort of guidance by the authorities in terms of getting the system in place we are."

Comm: "With the basic Tomra model low cost - how can anyone afford not to invest?"

Christian Stabell Eriksen, Centra Gruppen: "We should look upon this as a competitive advantage. I think this is the world of tomorrow taking care of our environment, taking care of our customers, taking care of our earth for our children of tomorrow."

Story 5: Vacutug, Kenya

Comm: "Nairobi. Its centre is proud and gleaming but there's another hidden side. The shanty town of Kebira is home to three quarters of a million people - the result of rapid urban expansion. It's unplanned and its sanitation system is crude. Collecting and recycling waste is one way to make extra cash ...so is collecting sewage...

"Each inhabitant shares one lavatory with a hundred others. None flush. Most overflow. People often give up using them."

Woman: "The toilets are full up in Kebira and they make the place filthy. As a result we get many diseases such as typhoid and cholera. You get flies and children pick things up and eat them. It gives them diarrhoea and makes them vomit."

Comm: "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No - it's Vacutug. A lavatory emptying machine and nice little money spinner

"Front wheel drive. Two gears - one in each direction. Reversible vacuum pump. PVC hose with quick release couplings. Top speed - 5 KPH/km ph.

"And it comes in any colour you like - as long as it's blue.

"The residents of Kebira have great hopes for Vacutug's one-machine clean-up mission.

"When Vacutug bursts into life, the whole neighbourhood comes out to watch. They've never seen anything quite like it before.

"Vacutug is small and sturdy. It has to be to cope with the bumpy and narrow lanes of the shanty town.

"The first big job of the day is to empty the multiple lavatory block at the local school.

"It's a messy business and the operators need protective clothing.

"Vacutug is designed to be made and operated locally in any country with sanitation problems like Kebira's.

"Atmospheric pressure forces the latrine contents along the hose-pipe into a 500 litre vacuum tank.

"Drinking water is also at risk from contamination by human waste. Kebira's water pipes run through its roads with minimal protection. They break easily and the water mingles with liquefied faeces from the overflowing lavatories.

"The job at the school finished, Vacutug empties its contents into the main sewer for hygienic disposal.

"The vacuum pump is reversible so the contents can be discharged quickly - up to 1,700 litres a minute.

"Vacutug is a business idea as well as a public health project. There are training courses for operators, who'll lease the machines and make money. There's a healthy profit to be made out of a healthier environment. Its hoped many Vacutugs will soon be working the area

"So - Vacutug's services aren't free. Landlords are responsible for emptying the lavatories. And they must pay up front - about 8 US dollars per tankful of waste.

"But this is still a pilot scheme - Vacutug could also be operated by local councils or directly by communities themselves.

"Before Vacutug, the only way to clean a lavatory was to pay someone to dig out the pit by hand - with obvious health risks.

"But one Vacutug alone can't cope with waste from three-quarters of a million people.

"Until there are more, demand for its services exceeds supply. And the dangers to health continue.

"Vacutug must go forth and multiply."