This appears in The Times this morning:
Recycling is based on the near-religious belief that everything has value,
everything is worth saving, except your time.
A rather strange belief, given how few of us go into that long, dark night
complaining of too much time on our hands while here. Thus, when the
acolytes of the faith suggest a new form of Gaia worship, we should have a
close look at what this means in terms of our time, as with the latest
proposals for recycling domestic waste.
A study into the time spent sorting rubbish to recycle in Seattle showed that
for recyclables the average per household was 16 minutes a week. Add in food
and garden waste and it rose to 43 minutes. There are 24 million households
in the UK, so that adds up to a significant cost – but how should we measure
this in monetary terms? We have a law that forbids us from selling our time
at less than about £5 an hour: you know it as the minimum wage but it does
help us with our calculation, since that is evidently the minimum possible
value of our labour. The Worstall Calculator (envelope, 1, pencil, 1) tells
us that our time spent in sorting our rubbish by these new rules has a cost
of between £1.7 and £4.5 billion.
This might make sense and it might not, depending on what costs we are trying
to avoid by employing ourselves in this manner. Fortunately, we again have
the Government’s word for this, in a report called Waste Not Want Not
from the Strategy Unit. The concern driving the whole process is that
domestic waste disposal costs some £1.6 billion a year and that this will
rise to £3.2 billion by 2020.
The solution being proposed is thus that we should spend more money than the
cost of the entire waste disposal process in sorting the rubbish, before we
spend still more collecting it, recycling or incinerating it and then
tipping the remainder into the same holes in the ground that we’ve always
used. The system will cost more in total than the old one in the name of
saving money.
I called the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to check the
figures. How much time had it used in its estimates ? What was the cost in
the analysis? The answer was that it had no estimate. Another way to put
this is that – according to the Government, as well as the Gaian acolytes –
your time is worth nothing.
There is a legitimate concern about methane emissions from food rotting in
landfills. Fortunately, as Elliot Morley (at that time a Defra minister)
told the Commons in 2004, this has already been solved: all modern landfills
collect this greenhouse gas and use it to create energy.
This rather provides an answer to the question of how we are governed today
and I hope you won’t accuse me of understatement if I suggest that the
answer is “not very well”.
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