That's rubbish!

What to do

First, watch the video without subtitles and without reading the transcript below. Use the transcript to answer the language questions after watching the video.


Language

With a partner try to guess the meaning of the following phrases. Then discuss with your teacher.

  1. out of understanding
  2. out of pressure
  3. no small part
  4. cuttng-edge
  5. picked apart
  6. committed
  7. still a way to go

Transcript

Twenty years ago, all of Slovenia’s waste used to end up in landfill sites like this one.

This is the same site today. The amount of rubbish sent to landfill has dropped significantly.

One reason is that here in the capital Ljubljana an impressive 70 per cent of all waste is now recycled.

 Tina Ban
“One is for plastic. This one is for paper... organic... glass... There is also one container for general trash. So I actually can’t recall when we started recycling, yeah.”

Does everybody take part?

 Tina Ban
“You can never know, yeah, how much people respect it, but, yeah, many people do follow these rules, and out of understanding, and not just out of pressure.”

People here are also expected to sort their waste in the city centre, and it’ll cost you a euro each time you want to throw away something non-recyclable. But even this waste isn’t sent to landfill.

It might be hard to believe but there are 24 metres of rubbish below my feet.

This is a former landfill site, but Ljubljana has been shutting places like this down, because it’s now putting 80 per cent less waste into the ground, and in no small part thanks to this place.

This is Ljubljana’s cutting-edge waste management facility. On top of recycled waste, the centre receives a hundred and seventy thousand tons of organic and residual waste every year. The organic waste is turned into compost and the unsorted residual waste is picked apart.

 Vanja Fabjan
“There’s still some recyclables inside. We pull also out the part for landfilling, which is now a very small amount, less than five percent of the mass that comes here. So, everything I didn’t mention we sort out here as alternative fuel.”

The centre sends this alternative fuel to companies that use it instead of fossil fuels and capture the CO2 produced during the process.

Ljubljana has now committed to go zero waste meaning the city will aim to send no rubbish to landfill sites. There’s still a way to go before that can happen but the city hopes others will be inspired by its success so far.

Ben Taverner - BBC News - Ljubljana
10 December 2019

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