More lunacy on domestic waste driven by European Union foolishness.

Householders could lose their weekly visit from the binmen as councils
come under mounting pressure to switch to fortnightly refuse
collections.

A Whitehall-funded study published today concludes that concerns about
overflowing bins attracting vermin are misplaced provided the waste is
dealt with "in a clean and efficient way."
…
"This study conclusively nails the idea that they cause rats and other
vermin as long as food waste is wrapped up. If people are clean and
efficient with waste, there should be no problem at all."

I thought the battle was to have less packaging these days, rather than more?

So, why are we doing this?

Under EU rules, councils must reduce the amount of
rubbish they send to landfill by 2010 or they will be fined £150 for
every ton over a prescribed limit.

The target is to recycle 40 per cent of rubbish but Britain manages only 27 per cent.

Yes, someone in Brussels got the idea that recycling "saves resources". Which, unfortunately, it doesn’t. It costs more to recycle than it does to landfill. It uses more energy to recycle than it does to landfill. It takes more time and labour to reycle than it does to landfill. In short, we use more resources recycling than we do in landfilling.

We even have a handy way of checking this. If we were indeed saving precious resources, then people would be making money out of the process. Indeed, people would be bidding to take the waste from you, as they do with things worth recucling, like gold jewelry and steel scrap. But no, we do not see people offering lucky householders cash for their scraps. We see them demanding subsidies to reluctantly take it. It is, thus, quite clearly, more resource intensive than landfilling.

So we shouldn’t be doing it at all, let alone trying to get it to 40% of the waste stream, or whatever other fatuous target is decided by our Masters in Brussels.

Can we leave yet?