Recycling recycling

Another dodgy green claim that I've looked at from time to time is the environmental and economic benefits of recycling.

In Roger Harrabin's latest piece, we hear once again about the resources expended on recycling, and once again we hear that there is little or no market for all the product of all this spending.

Shifting priorities on waste presents many challenges. Many councils have moved to co-mingled waste in which domestic waste is sent to recycling centres where items are separated by air-blowing machines like giant tumble-driers.

The system is cheaper than separation by hand, but can leave fragments of waste in the wrong recycling streams - glass in paper is a particular problem.

Another challenge is developing markets for recycled materials. The UK waste industry is fragmented with different councils adopting very different approaches.

Environmentalists do love waste don't they?

The case against recycling

The author, Susan Hill, has a blog which I visit from time to time. She has just written a piece which touches on the subject of recycling.

I was in the process of launching into a major lecture on the evils of recycling in the comments, when I thought the better of it - it was becoming rather too long and possibly a bit of a rant. I've therefore put down my thoughts, such as they are, here.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, recycling is rubbish.

Firstly, there is no shortage of landfill space. We are quarrying a larger volume of stone each year than we produce of landfill. The reason we seem to have a shortage is that the EU has decreed that we should close most of our landfill down. Why they have done this is anyone's guess, but I imagine corruption has something to do with it. (I'm cynical like that.)

Secondly, packaging has very little to do with landfill anyway. According to Friends of the Earth, if you analyse landfill by type, packaging isn't even in the top ten. The biggest culprit is building waste.

Thirdly, packaging is your friend. If I recall correctly 40% of American rubbish is packaging. 40% of Mexican rubbish is food that's gone off because it wasn't adequately packaged - similar conclusions are reached here. The real waste of precious resources is throwing away food, not packaging, most of which is plastic - a by-product of the oil refining industry that would have to be burnt if it wasn't used. Put it another way: why do the rapacious capitalists who run the supermarkets spend all that money wrapping up cucumbers (which annoys their customers) if there isn't some benefit to them? The answer turns out to be very simple: it keeps fungal spores off the cucumber and so doubles the shelf-life. That's saving resources, that is.

Fourthly, recycling is a tremendous waste of resources, on the whole. We know this, because it requires subsidies to get anyone to recycle most materials. Commercial businesses will not produce, say, recycled paper without subsidy, because all the resources required to bleach and reprocess it outweigh the value of the end product. There are exceptions, like aluminium and some other waste metals. We have a long-standing, subsidy-free recycling industry (called scrapyards) for these things. 

Lastly, a modern landfill is a rather marvellous thing. It is lined with clay and plastic liners so there is no leaching of pollution into the water table. Any leachate is collected and metals can be extracted from it. The methane given off is collected too and can be used as a fuel. (Source).This is real, commercially viable recycling, as opposed to the woolly tree-hugging, spend-and-be-damned type that ruins the environment and impoverishes us all.

If you have a dull afternoon, try looking on the internet for scientific evidence to support the concept of recycling. There is nearly nothing, and what little there is appears to be outdated and conceptually flawed.

/rant

Bill Bryson talks rubbish

Bill Bryson:

Now here is a fact to make you sit up. In the three years to last November, the city of Sheffield recorded a rather whopping (but by no means exceptional) 441,361 instances of fly-tipping. In the same period, it managed to catch and prosecute exactly one person.

That's pretty remarkable, but it's not actually the fact I am on about. The fact I am on about is this: when the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs released its latest annual fly-tipping survey, Sheffield was held up as a model because the number of fly-tipping incidents there fell from 161,000 to 108,000 over the year.

That is an improvement, to be sure, but a rather dispiriting one nonetheless. We have reached the point where it is considered cheering news when only 300 vanloads of rubbish a day are illicitly dumped along a city's streets.

And there's screeds more in the same vein. Even so, our man Bryson actually manages to miss the main reason why people take to fly-tipping. You don't have to dump your rubbish on street corners, after all. There's a perfectly legal way to do it too - take it to the council dump (sorry, recycling centre). But of course, the government has decided to make landfill prohibitively expensive by slapping lots of lovely taxes on it (all for the benefit of the environment you understand). And if you mention that then you might also have to let on that they've done this because the EU has told the UK to close most of its landfills, allegedly to encourage recycling.

And it would be most non-U to mention Brussels in a critical way, wouldn't it?

Update:

The Times reports that car owners will be fined if CCTV operators observe litter being thrown from their vehicles. Why do I now find the timing of Bryson's article a strange coincidence? 

Three rubbish thoughts

Three thoughts occurred to me today, as I was trying to squeeze a bag of rubbish into our overflowing wheelie bin. The reason it is overfilled is that Mrs Bishop forgot to put the bin out last week when she was doing the school run.

The first thought was this: if we are to move to fortnightly rubbish collections, and I forget to put my wheelie bin out, does that mean I could have four weeks worth of rubbish sitting outside? In mid summer?  A health hazard, surely?

The second thought was this:  how many bin men will be laid off as a result of only having to collect the rubbish fortnightly? What savings have been acheived in those councils (like Stephen Tall's Oxford) which have already instituted fortnightly collections?

The last thought was this: is the whole thing actually a way for the councils to deliver a worse service for the same cost, thus helping to secure their pensions?

God I'm getting cynical.