The slow, green way to recycle

The news that a vast, shiny, new state of the art recycling centre in Lancashire is to be mothballed after incurring "catastrophic losses" will not come as much of a surprise to anyone who keeps an eye on the green scene. A moment's thought by anyone with more than a couple of braincells to rub together leads to the inevitable conclusion that expending vast resources - energy, labour, capital, chemicals and the like - to turn low value items into even lower value items is not much of an economic proposition. With councils increasingly cash-strapped, it is becoming ever harder to sustain the illusion that recycling is anything other than virtue-signalling from middle-class poseurs.

Perhaps landfill needs to have its brand detoxified. Rather than wasting all those precious resources on collecting refuse to turn it into heaven knows what, let's use the power of Mother Nature to break down and recycle what can be broken down, leaving what is inert to cause no trouble to anyone. Yes, it will be slower than what passes for recycling now, but aren't greens in favour of using slower, more natural approaches whenever they can?

"Landfill: the slow, green way to recycle".

Thinking, or not thinking, about coffee

Today's "stupidity signalling" story is the mainstream media's excitement over a report that we are throwing away three billion disposable coffee cups each year. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that disposable cups are disposed of on such a prodigious scale because they are made of very cheap, very abundant materials and need little energy along the way. Nor do they seem to have clocked that ceramic cups are much more expensive because they require huge amounts of energy to make.

Still, this nonsense does fill up their pages for them.

Greens blighting communities

There was an interesting report on the Sky website yesterday about recycling firms who are going out of business, leaving piles of festering waste for others to clear up.

More than 60 rotting waste piles are blighting communities in areas including Wiltshire, Kent, the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Fife.

The Environment Agency said in 2014-2015 it was dealing with 50 abandoned sites in England, 10 of which contain more than 5,000 tons.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency said it was handling the clearance of another 14 sites of varying sizes.

All follow the same pattern of recycling firms starting-up business on private land then going into liquidation and leaving the waste mounds for landowners or the authorities to clean up at a cost millions of pounds.

Insolvency on that scale looks more like design than accident. When you set this against what we already know about recycling plants - the daily fires and the stories of fraud that already blight the "industry", the sheer scale of the corruption that environmental policy is supporting becomes clear.

It's hard to credit the idea that anyone would think that mandatory recycling was a good idea. But the gentlemen pictured above apparently do.

Why?

Quote of the day, recycling edition

Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily. But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly.

John Tierney revisits his legendary 1996 article about the insanity of most forms of recycling and concludes, that 20 years on, he remains completely correct.

I don't think he is mistaken.

Is landfill the greener way to recycle?

Another recycling plant has gone up in smoke. This time the facility involved is in Wales, and there is apparently a fear that it could burn for days.

In related news a plastics recycling facility in Thailand was wiped out by fire a few hours ago.

On Saturday, it was a facility in Virginia that proved incendiary.

On Friday, there were two facilities in flames, one in Forth Worth and one in South Carolina.

Click to read more ...

Pyrotechnics: feature or bug?

Another day, another recycling facility goes up in smoke. This time it's the Viridor plastics recycling facility in Chatham, which is sure to give the fire services an entertaining time trying to deal with rivers of molten plastic as well as the flames and the noxious fumes.

Last time we had a major recycling facility blaze, it turned out to be arson and with recyclers turning to ash at an alarming rate of knots you have to wonder if such pyrotechnics are not actually a bug, but instead are a feature of a system that bribes people to process low-value materials at high cost.

It's the environment, see?

For anybody who thinks about these things for longer than a couple of seconds, it's pretty much clear that recycling is something that should happen to scarce, valuable resources rather than cheap and readily available ones. This is because recycling itself uses resources, so you don't want to expend a load of time, money, effort and materials in order to get something that is not worth very much.

In the FT today, Pillita Clark notes that the collapse of oil prices has put plastic recyclers under a great deal of pressure, as container makers have started to prefer virgin material to recycled. Some companies in the trade have collapsed as a result. This is as it should be. The effort of collecting, sorting and then grinding up old plastic bottles is clearly too high when the product has a low value.

Click to read more ...

Fire down below

Another day, another fire at a recycling plant, this time at a site near Hull (H/T Stewgreen).

Firefighters were battling a major fire at a waste recycling plant in Melton early today.

The fire broke out at a large facility in Gibson Lane shortly after 7am.

At least six crews from Humberside Fire and Rescue were in attendance and large plumes of acrid black smoke could be seen coming from the scene.

This is getting to be a familiar story isn't it?

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Battle of Ideas: What is 'new environmentalism'? cartoon notes by Josh

On Sunday I went to a Battle of Ideas debate/seminar titled "What is 'new environmentalism'?" produced by Ben Pile who was also on the panel. This included Mark Lynas, Joe Smith and Casper Hewett with Timandra Harkness as the very able and amusing chair.

Click to read more ...

Wrapped in cotton wool

Defra has invited comments on its plan to cut back spending on WRAP, the quango charged with spending money on dreaming up burdensome recycling schemes.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has called on stakeholders and partners to submit their views regarding future funding for the Waste & Resources Action Programme’s (WRAP) activities.

Defra has stated that in order for the government to ‘succeed in reducing the current budget deficit,’ its review of funding for WRAP is ‘necessary as a contribution to wider savings’.

It is hoped the review will ‘identify whether the WRAP delivery model continues to be the most appropriate way to deliver policy interventions in support of waste reduction and resource efficiency… and to secure best value for public money’.

Interestingly, spending already seems to have been cut back, although it's slightly unclear by how much because WRAP is only part funded by Defra, the rest coming from the devolved administrations.

A quick look at the accounts suggests there is plenty of flab still to be dealt with. Over £300k is handed out to the two executive directors (plus pension), and there are a dozen non-execs taking home another £200k between them.

Recycled policy

Lest we get too excited about the quenching of Geoffrey Lean's AGW ardour, the Mail's front-page story will concentrate minds. The subject is recycling and, erm, recycles a story that has done the rounds before, namely that a significant proportion of what householders are forced to sort is then shipped to the Far East, where it is subsequently quietly landfilled.

The reason for this travesty is that you, the public, are not up to scratch.

Click to read more ...

No jam tomorrow

Yet more madness from the bureaucrats in Europe...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/10/07/now-the-european-union-starts-to-ban-recycling/

Zero Waste Scotland

Tim Worstall, writing at the Adam Smith Institute blog, looks at a new way of measuring the (alleged) benefits of recycling - looking at the carbon footprint - and finds much to applaud.

Full marks to "Zero Waste Scotland" for this idea. For as we keep being told, we've got to recycle in order to stop the planet burning up. Therefore, as you would think people would already have cottoned on to, we should be measuring what we recycle and how by how well doing so stops the planet burning up. That everyone should have done this earlier is true but more joy in heaven over one sinner repentant etc.

Tim's prediction is that once the new scheme has demonstrated unequivocally that all this recycling we are doing has a higher carbon footprint than landfilling it will be quietly dropped.

Meanwhile, Andrew Bolt-style questioning is catching on, at least in one small corner of England. The Englishman has written to Zero Waste Scotland to find out how much their scheme will cool the planet.

Enviromentalists trashing the environment (again)

A few months back there was a report that the low-energy lightbulbs demanded by environmentalists and served up by a complicit government are causing dangerously high levels of mercury in children's bedrooms. Now, in strangely similar news, it is reported that recycled cardboard is causing some foods to have dangerously high levels of mineral oils.

Researchers found toxic chemicals from recycled newspapers had contaminated food sold in many cardboard cartons.

The chemicals, known as mineral oils, come from printing inks.

Cereal firm Jordans has stopped using recycled cardboard and other firms are to ensure their recycled packaging does not contain any toxic oils.

Do you recycle?

There is an interview with Bjorn Lomborg here (H/T Chris by email). Anyone who has followed BL in the past will have heard most of it before, but I was struck by his statement that he still recycles.

Just to be clear, you are still green?
Absolutely. Obviously, I still recycle. I don't own a car.

My impression of most recycling is that it is very wasteful of resources, the chief exeption being aluminium. Given that Lomborg's claim to fame is that he checks out the numbers on these issues, I was surprised to see him say what he did.

Am I wrong? Do readers here recycle (if they can help it)?