Very sad to see this:

Paul Bettison is talking rubbish. As chairman of the Local Government
Association’s environment board, Councillor Bettison frequently talks
rubbish. But today he’s talking more rubbish than I can imagine: almost
27m tons of it.

That, of course, is the jokey intro from John-Paul Flintoff. The problem is that he actually believes the rubbish he is being told, the pure and utter bollocks that is being fed to him.

According to the LGA, the average British household produces half a ton
of rubbish a year. In total, we send 7m tons more rubbish to landfill
than any other country in Europe. One country in particular puts us to
shame: Germany has 25% more people but produces less than half as much
trash.

Why is it "shameful" to produce trash? There’s an empirical question buried in this. Which uses less resources? Using something and sticking it in a hole in the ground? Or recycling it? As an empirical answer, it will depend upon what the thing itself is. Recycling amuminium cans makes great sense: this is why people who do it make a profit doing so. Recycling paper not so much: there’s an FoE paper somewhere out there that hems and haws a lot but seems to be saying that such recycling uses more energy than either incineration or landfilling (both of which can be net energy generators of course).

I’m also rather concerned about the idea of taking tips on recycling from Germany. They’re the morons who introduced a bottle and packaging recycling scheme where you could only return items to the store you bought it in. So that juice tetrapak you bought at the trian station: well, that’s another 300 km round trip to recycle it. Genius, don’t you think?

And now we’re running out of space to bury it all. Within nine years there’ll be no landfill sites left, says Bettison.

Err, that’s because the EU said we couldn’t use what we have any more. That anyone actually believes that in a nation of  93,000 square miles we can’t find 100 odd to provide landfill for the next century is simply absurd. 0.1% of our land area? Bugger me, people use more than that of their garden for compost heaps!

Then there’s climate change: it takes a lot of energy, and creates a
lot of emissions, to manufacture rubbish in the first place, then to
ferry it to landfill or burn it.

And it takes even more to recycle it. So if we were concerned about climate change we would stop recycling and landfill or burn it all. In fact, if we landfilled it we could capture the methane as it roted and thus provide ourselves with some power: didn’t a comment here point out that 30% of current renewables generation comes from this very practice? Burning it has another problem though. You’re not allowed to generate power from burning waste. Another EU Directive there.

Siân Berry, principal speaker of the Green party, says: “If we go
whole-heartedly for recycling, reuse and waste minimisation, we would
create thousands of jobs, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and
conserving finite resources.”

Mmm. "Create thousands of jobs". You mean take people away from what they are doing now and force them to do something of lower productivity. Excellent, way to get rich there.

Many people will find it hard to believe we are running out of space
for landfill. But as Bettison explains, we usually dump rubbish in old
quarries and we’re filling up the holes much faster than we’re
excavating them. Anyway, some spaces aren’t suitable because the
contents of rubbish — cat food, old batteries, nappies, aspirin — might
leak out, poisoning water sources

That’s why modern landfills are in fact constructed, so that nothing does leach into the groundwater. This man is talking the most atrocious bollocks I’m afraid.

If we stopped doing that — if the public stopped buying apples in trays
— within a month the supermarkets would stop selling them that way.

That bit is correct. Reducing the use of packaging by supermarkets is entirely in the hands of the consumer. Stop buying the packaged products and the supermarkets will indeed stop selling it. Just like they fell over themselves to offer organic food when people started to buy it. No government intervention needed.

So much for “reduce”. When it comes to “reuse”, Bettison commends the
work of his crack troops: elderly volunteers working in charity shops
and reselling all kinds of hitherto unwanted items. Councils support
these shops, he points out, by waiving commercial rates on retail sites
that might otherwise stand empty. The internet also helps — through
businesses such as eBay, and networks such as Freecycle, where unwanted
goods change hands at no cost.

Excellent, so let’s rescind the idiot laws that stop shops from reselling used electrical goods.

In waste management, demand is entirely driven by legislation — without
laws, we’d probably still throw rubbish from our windows.

Gosh, would we? So it’s only the law that stops us crapping out of windows? Never knew that. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it is in fact the law that has lead to an increase in fly tipping recently.

…whether they refuse to recycle or, like some energetic greens, they
recycle printer cartridges, unravel old sweaters to reuse the wool,
send unused bikes to developing countries, and tear the plasticky foil
lining out of Tetra Pak cartons before shredding the leftover cardboard
to chuck in their composting bin.

I’ve pointed out before that we only need each household in Britain to spend 15 minutes a week recycling for that cost ot be greater than the entire waste disposal system of landfilling the lot. Anyone seriously want to assert that the level of recycling described there will not take a family 15 minutes a week?

It would require massive expenditure, says Eric Pickles, the shadow
minister for local government, on compulsory wheelie bins to be
installed in every home in Britain and an army of municipal inspectors
to check the contents. “Bin taxes would be deeply harmful to the local
environment,” Pickles adds, “causing a surge in fly-tipping.”

“That is a problem,” concedes Bettison solemnly, “and I don’t know what the answer is.”

Simple: landfill it all.