LIKE THE LAYERS of broken pottery used in archaeology to study the growth and decline of the Roman Empire, the piles of rubbish illegally dumped in fields and lay-bys around my village stand as a record to the various failures of government policy on waste disposal.
First it was piles of builders’ rubble, provoked by the introduction of the landfill tax in 1996. Then it was fridge mountains, discarded because the new rules banning the release of CFC gases into the atmosphere were brought in before there was any industrial plant capable of disposing of the gases properly. Next, it will almost certainly be piles of black bin bags full of domestic rubbish.
This week Sir Michael Lyons, who is conducting an inquiry into local government finance, proposed that local authorities reduce their council tax bills by levying a charge on domestic waste collections. Householders would be billed between 25 and 50 pence for every kilo of waste put out for the dustman. In theory, the scheme would help to promote recycling, but it is not hard to predict what would happen in practice. Every darkened alleyway of every council estate would turn into a waste tip, and honest residents would find themselves footing the bill for other people’s rubbish discarded in their wheelie bin.
All this in the furtherance of a recycling policy that is at best questionable. In 2000, egged on by a European directive on reducing landfill, the Government set itself a target of recycling a quarter of domestic rubbish by 2005 and a third by 2015. With 23 per cent of household rubbish collected for recycling last year it claims to have come close to achieving this target. Whether the environment has benefited is another matter. Most “recycled” green bottles, for example, are crushed and turned into aggregates for road-building — in other words landfill by another name.
As for other waste collected for recycling, much of it ends up being shipped to China, notionally to recycling plants, though no one seems to be able to account for it all. In March, Dutch customs officers intercepted a consignment of 1,000 tonnes of British rubbish passing through Rotterdam on its way to China. The consignment, labelled as waste paper, turned out to be contaminated with all sorts of other rubbish, suggesting that it may have been bound for a Chinese waste tip.
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But even if British waste paper really does get recycled in China, how do we know that this is better for the environment than burning it in British incinerators and using the heat to generate electricity? The answer is we don’t. The Government decided on its recycling strategy without conducting a proper environmental audit.
There are certain materials — aluminium cans, especially — which it is almost certainly best to recycle, the process of manufacturing aluminium being especially power-hungry. But the same does not necessarily apply to paper. The process of recycling paper, and transporting waste paper to recycling plants, consumes large quantities of fossil fuel. By contrast, a policy of incinerating paper close to where it was consumed, and using the heat to generate electricity, would help to reduce demand for fossil fuels. For years Nottingham has disposed of much of its domestic waste in a “combined heat and power plant” that generates electricity and uses waste hot water to heat local homes. It is an efficient strategy, but one that other councils find hard to emulate for fear of failing to meet their recycling targets.
There has been a similar lack of thought regarding composted waste. Many councils have met their recycling targets thanks to kerbside collections of garden waste. But as was pointed out this week by the Waste Resources Action Programme (established by the Government to create markets for recycled materials), were it not for the kerbside collections householders would be composting much of this waste in their own gardens — doing away with the need for tens of thousands of lorry movements every year.
The Government fails to address the contradictions of recycling because it views recycling as an end in itself. Indeed, it recently raised its recycling target: it now wants 40 per cent of domestic waste recycled by 2010 and half by 2020. It will be pointless if this is achieved at the cost of increased consumption of fossil fuels and a rise in illegal dumping.
Long before the term “recycling” became common currency I remember taking empty bottles of pop down to the local shop to claim back the deposit. With the princely sum of threepence at stake, no lemonade bottle ever found its way into our dustbin. Neither was it carted off to China or crushed and buried beneath a motorway: it was washed and re-used as a bottle. Rather than charging us for our rubbish collections, and giving us the perverse incentive to chuck our bin bags in the nearest hedge, the Government should create a similarly positive incentive system for the responsible disposal of rubbish.
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Whenever we buy anything we should be levied a deposit based on the environmental cost of dumping the item and its packaging in a landfill site. If, when we have finished with it, we instead present the item for re-use, recycling or as power station fuel — whichever has the lower environmental cost — we should be able to reclaim our deposit.
Packaging manufacturers would moan bitterly, but so what? Such a system would present easily the most environment-friendly means of dealing with rubbish — preventing large quantities of unnecessary packaging from being made in the first place.