Utter garbage - an average Helsinki resident produces 340 kilos of household waste each year
Half of the waste ends up in landfill tips, and nearly all the plastic. This began to trouble artist Kaisa Salmi.
By Merituuli Saikkonen
Hey, you. Yes, YOU. Do you live in the Helsinki region?
If you do, you might like to know that you produce 337 kilograms of household waste each year. You leave behind 120 kilos of paper, 82 kilos of bio and garden waste, 26 kilos of plastic, 24 kilos of paperboard, 15 kilos of glass, 16 kilos of metal, 11 kilos of disposable nappies, 10 kilos of wood, three kilos of electronics junk…
Of the waste that you produce, 172 kilograms is recycled while 165 kilograms ends up at the tip. The most efficiently recycled waste product is paper, of which no less than 86% ends up being used again.
Of all the product groups, plastic has the poorest recycling ratio.
“In practice, 100 per cent of it ends up in the landfill heaps at the dump", explains Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority (HSY) environmental expert Olli Linsiö.
One morning not long ago, all this plastic began to distress environmental artist Kaisa Salmi.
“I looked at the rubbish bag as i was taking it out. It was completely full of plastic”, Salmi says.
“Then I counted that there were 59 households in our apartment complex. Together we produce a quite astounding amount of plastic rubbish.”
Salmi is the artist who in in recent summers has outfitted the stone steps leading up to the Finnish Parliament Building (2007) and the square next to Helsinki’s Central Railway Station (2009) with tens of thousands of gerbera flowers.
Even this year the City of Helsinki wished for something of a "mass gerbera installation" nature from Ms. Salmi, but instead they got something completely different.
“On Monday morning I will begin to construct on the Narinkkatori Square, in front of the Kamppi shopping mall, a 4.5-metre high and 27-metre long wall made entirely out of waste plastic”, Salmi explains. The installation will contain 18,000 kilos of plastic waste. It's not quite gerberas.
“I suppose I have become more environmentally aware.”
”The flood of plastic waste causes anxiety to others as well”, Linsiö explains.
“We receive lots of enquiries about it. The problem with household plastics is that they do not recycle well, owing to their being dirty and not of uniform quality.”
Plastic could be turned into recycled fuel, and then burned in some large industrial establishment.
“But then again the problem is that in the Helsinki region there is not a single plant that could burn plastic for fuel”, Linsiö continues.
Plastic has been transported to Lahti and Anjalankoski to be burned there.
In four years’ time it will also be possible to incinerate it in neighbouring Vantaa.
In the waste incinerator power plant to be completed there in 2014, rubbish will be burned to produce district heat and electricity.
In the future, all the plastic and other garbage that is now taken to the Ämmänsuo tip will be incinerated in Vantaa.
In other words, in excess of the equivalent of 500 one-litre milk cartons, nearly 5,800 plastic yoghurt pots that - were they to be stacked - would form a tower 58 metres in height, 22 bucketfuls of bio waste, 69 glass jars, 82 fruit cocktail cans, a pile of paper more than two metres high (and paper and newsprint is mercifully one of the most-recycled items), ten TV remote control devices' worth of electronics junk, 54 wet disposable diapers, and a couple of planks of wood that are now being ferried to the dump each year, courtesy of you and me.
For all this and a whole lot more is what every single Helsinki resident leaves behind each year to be taken to the city’s landfill sites in the dustman's truck.
Kaisa Salmi’s Muovivyöry (“Plastic Avalanche”) installation can be seen in the Narinkkatori Square until June 9th.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 31.5.2010
MERITUULI SAIKKONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
merituuli.saikkonen@hs.fi
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| 1.6.2010 - THIS WEEK |
 Utter garbage - an average Helsinki resident produces 340 kilos of household waste each year |
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