Recycling Facilities added to Google maps

For a multimedia version of this blog entry please click here

For those of us who would rather do a little research on the web before we leave our houses, rather than waste extra time and fuel on finding where we’re going, Google Maps is a great tool.

While Worcestershire County Council’s waste management website is a great tool for finding out what to do with your rubbish and what can be recycled and when, its use of the term “Waste Sites” is quite misleading. I think they should be renamed “Recycling Centres” or “Resource Recovery Facilities”. 

With land fill taxes spiralling upwards and even though energy prices are remaining steady for the moment, it just doesn’t make economic or environmental sense to make big holes in the ground in one part of the Wold, process the ore, refine it, smelt it, ship it to another part of the World, then manufacture the goods ship them again, use the product and then bury it in another hole on the other side of the Planet from where the raw material originally came from once we’re finished with it. Exhausting just thinking about it isn’t it? Just imagine the energy that it takes, almost entirely provided by fossil fuels, which are, of course, emitted as that famous greenhouse gas CO2. 

Most of our metal and mineral resources come from big holes in the ground like this, Northparkes mine in NSW, Australia. While mine site management has progressed massively towards the goals of sustainability, they are still among the deepest of our ecological footprints. It makes far more economic and environmental sense to repair, reduce, reuse and recycle our resources within our society than look deeper and deeper into our environment to sustain our needs. 

With the pressures of modern life we all have limited time on our hands, so if we are to make the transition to a sustainable future, we need the process to be as simple and painless as possible.  While the official Waste Sites website is useful, there are bound to be times, like when we’re clearing out a loft or garage, when we have a little more to “junk” to throw out than can be squeezed into our fragile recycling bags, and then we have to find one of 11 recycling centres in Worcestershire, or 5 in Herefordshire. This is where the Councils’ website become a bit clunky, with dodgy maps that are not easy to understand. This is why I spent this morning finding where each and every recycling centre is across the two counties and adding them to Google Maps, which can be used to find the location, telephone number and website address of each specific centre, as well as directions to and from your home, so you can use it to find out which centre is closes to you.

Here is a fully functioning map for the Bilford Road Recycling Centre in Worcester:

If anyone is interested in adding your local recycling centres to Google Maps and would like to know how, or you’ve added other eco-useful content at a place  near you, please let us know!! Contact us here

Toby Roscoe (EcoHub | Sustainability Solutions)