Is this really a Tory proposal?
a doubling of landfill tax for business…
Aren’t they supposed to be the party of economic rationality?
The Conservatives will also propose a locally levied waste tax linked
to a household’s success in recycling and composting. Landfill will be
banned from 2015 for any item that could be recycled.
Anything and everything can in theory be recycled. The question is, at what cost? You can make arguments on purely cash terms, in which case we already do too much recycling (way, way too much when you consider the cost of the labour that goes into sorting it). Or you might want to be much more restrictive and look at, say, the greenhouse gas emissions of recycling versus landfill.
A couple of notes on that: the use of green glass as roadfill creates more CO2 e than landfilling it does. So the recycling of green glass (which, as we tend not to bottle much wine in this country, has no other use) actively damages the environment.
Further, as that recent report showed, composting by use of a wormery creates greenhouse gases: notably, nitrous oxide from the worms. Total CO2 e emissions from a wormery are equal to said from a landfill. One puts out the nitrous, the other methane. But that is CO2 e, equivalent. The nitrous floats off into the atmosphere, while the methane is captured and used to generate energy, turning it into CO2. Thus landill, in hte end, releases 23 times less CO2 e than wormeries.
And, in order to save the planet, we’re going to insist that people compost?
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