Such a pity that the whole debate over recycling is conducted in lies at present:
The LGA, which represents more than 400 councils in
England and Wales, warned that council tax bills could rise without
urgent action to cut waste and increase recycling.
Councils
that fail to meet recycling targets set under the EU landfill directive
currently face penalties of up to £150 per ton of rubbish dumped into
landfill sites.
The warning came as the association named Britain
"the dustbin of Europe", sending 27 million tons of rubbish to landfill
every year, the equivalent of almost half a ton for every home in the
country.
Germany, which has a population 25 per cent higher than the UK, disposes of only 10 million tons of rubbish.
An
area the size of Warwick, which covers 109 square miles, is currently
taken up by landfill, and Britain could run out of landfill space by
2016 if current trends continued, the LGA warned.
The only reason we are short of landfill sites is EU regulation which just closed, in the long term, most of our sites. The only reason why councils have to pay fines for landfilling is EU regulation which states that they must. However, if we looked at the actual costs of doing these things, without these instructions from the gauleiters of Brussels, we would find that landfill is actually the appropriate action for us to be taking.
For example, a well run landfill site collects the methane from the rotting of the contents and uses it to power nearby homes or factories, cutting global warming emissions. The process of collecting and the distributing materials for recycling uses vast amounts of energy, thus increasing greenhouse emissions. It is also true that if each household spends just 15 minutes a week sorting for the recycling, then this costs more than the entire landfilling process itself.
Someone, somewhere, has got it into their heads that recycling saves some vital natural resource, that in some manner we as a society make a profit from recycling. But if recycling costs us more to collect, costs us more to sort, then it might be difficult for this to be true….well, unless that resource really is terribly valuable. Now there are resources which make it worth it. Used Ferraris don’t end up in landfill, used steel does not, copper and so on. Indeed, people will pay you for the right to come and pick them up. The value of the resource is such that it covers those extra costs.
So we can actually come up with a very simple metric to judge the value or not of recycling. As and when the local council starts to pay you for the right to mine your waste for this precious natural resource then recycling is an economically efficient thing to do. While they are charging you to cover the losses they make on recycling, then it isn’t, and we should stop doing it.
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