After looking at the works of Elin Hoyland and Wang Juiliang who have produced photographic documentary series on waste in the Maldives and Beijing, it got me thinking if these kinds of sights that they photographed are possible to see in the UK. Because one cant imagine what the waste management program of foreign countries are so it makes sense that these photos of huge amounts of waste are found there, but we could never imagine this being the case in the UK.
I began looking into facts and figures of the UK's growing waste problem, to get an idea of scale before responding to my project outline in a photographic manner.
Go Green report that household waste in the UK is becoming and increasing problem, with people throwing out over 1.07 tonnes of waste per household every year, of which 403kg is recycled. Per person, 473kg of household rubbish is thrown out and 173kg recycled per year. The average amount we through away per household each year is the equivalent to the weight of a small family car. More than 27 million tonnes of waste is thrown into landfills across the UK each year. Whereas in Germany, which has a population that is 25% larger than the UK just 10 million tonnes are thrown away each year. Furthermore, according to a BBC report landfill space in the UK is 109 square miles which is roughly the size of Warwick and increasing each year.
Looking at the facts and figures its obvious that the UK has a problem with recycling. I believe that much of our society does not consider where they're waste of any type ends up after they throw it away, this connects with us having a 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality. The problem with these figures is that many people need visual information such as photographs to grasp the scale of the problem, because it is proven that images are a much quicker way of getting information into the brain. Also this point connects well with the 'What is photography?' part of my project because it can be said that photography is a very effective way of getting quick information into the brain, such as the scale of our waste problem. These points show that creating images that reflect and show our scale of waste in the UK will help in educating people to consider what they throw away, and that it will end up somewhere. This is because a lot of people feel they don't have time to read about certain problems, whereas visual information can impact them a lot faster and thus educates them without them knowing.
This means that my project on waste will hope to be used as visual information for the public of UK on how bad out waste problem is, and to consider where an object will end up when you throw it out.