Norway, the country of enthralling natural beauty, is excelling the art of waste management. The kingdom of Norway has come up with ideas worth adopting and has positively brought the entire conception of the three R’s into play. While other industrialized nations still scuffle, at an alarming rate, with the consumption of problematic plastic waste, Norway stands out by managing to recycle up to 97% of its plastic bottles. The country is breaking ground in scrutinizing all the aspects of waste supervision techniques by implementing a nationwide bottle deposit scheme.
Recycling technology has come a long way since the earliest vital investments in the sector. Anything and everything can now be recycled; paper, plastic, metal or an entire house. Through an organization called Infinitum, the Scandinavian country has established itself as the most effective of all by designing the best environment-friendly modes of recycling plastic bottles.While other countries are still in the process of forming a good stable model for recycling plastic trash, Norway sometimes imports trash to keep its recycling process going.
What makes Norway awe-inspiringly different is the way it has given recycling a value it never had and this value is what makes the companies and consumers walk on the righteous path to conserve our environment. Their radical approach is based on a loan scheme implying that when a consumer buys any plastic bottle, they are charged an additional amount of money equivalent to about 13 to 30 US cents which can be redeemed in discrete ways. The buyer can either take the plastic bottle to one of the several thousand ‘reverse vending machines’ present in public spaces like schools and supermarkets which returns the money after scanning the barcode of the deposited bottle or they can return them in shops and gas stations in exchange of money or store credit.
Also, the plastic producers in Norway are subject to an environmental tax and almost all of them have signed up for the bottle deposit scheme. Hence, the more plastic they recycle, the lesser their tax is and on reaching the target of recycling over 95 percent of total produced plastic, they don’t have to pay at all.
The four-container system
Apart from having the world’s most effective plastic recycling plans, Norway also has an intricate system that the locals have been taught since childhood. The Norwegian recycling idea also involves a colour coding system. The coloured bins and bags are basically to help people decipher what type of waste goes where. There are green, blue and white bins in0 some places and plain bins that take the specific green, blue and white waste in others. The food and organic waste should be dumped in the green bin/bag, all plastic packaging in blue, paper or cardboard related waste in white and lastly, the electronic or hazardous waste in the red.
Being one of the most systematic countries, Norway has remained unbeaten in maintaining a sound lifestyle for its citizens. And the Norwegian system of waste management is definitely giving the rest of the world a brilliant blueprint by proving that with the right tech and proper awareness, we can take big steps to have a trash-free future.
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