As UK householders continue to ask themselves (mostly on a fortnightly basis) where all the rubbish is going to go, anyone keeping an eye on government policy might well be asking where all the rubbish keeps coming from.
The Environment Secretary is apparently bringing forward proposals to allow local councils to impose charges for households which don't recycle enough household waste. In the rarified atmosphere of government policy-making that probably sounds like a great and logical idea: strong financial incentives to recycle more household waste. Further down the policy chain it sounds like a recipe for abuse of the system by all concerned.
For a start, it is based on an assumption that all households are currently able to recycle as much waste as they can reasonably be expected to produce. That assumption is false. There is currently no connection between the amount of recyclable waste I produce and the amount my council is prepared to collect - either at the kerbside or at municipal bins within walking distance.
As a result, I and many householders like me take surplus recyclable waste to a 'tip', driving an average round trip of 10 miles. I've illustrated some of the implications of this in a previous post. However, if I'm going to have to make the trip, I will make the maximum use of it - so I will load the car with anything recyclable, even if that means that I have nothing left to contribute to the next kerbside collection. If I could not afford to do this, I would have no option but to 'overload' the kerbside collection process, and presumably get charged for doing so. A rather regressive policy for a Labour government.
Then let's assume that I go as green as I can; imagine I boycott supermarkets which won't cut down on bulky cardboard and plastic packaging, I compost anything compostable and put the other biodegradable waste into a wormery, and I eventually reach the nirvana of a 'zero garbage footprint'. At that point, presumably, the council will fine me a huge sum for failing to recycle anything at all.
It just not possible for the council to assess, by monitoring kerbside collections, how much one household recycles relative to another, particularly as long as their collection policy is not linked in any way to the actual type and volume of waste produced. How the Environment Secretary thinks that can be converted into a fair and enforceable charging strategy is a mystery to me.
Then there's the point that in this district, the council refuses to take cardboard as 'compostable waste'; not because cardboard cannot be composted, but because they have not bought the kind of machine that can do this in under 12 weeks, and so they can't turn a quick enough profit on it through sales of the resulting compost.
All in all, I can see this policy resulting in fines for people who can't afford them, increased carbon emissions by people who can, and a quick and dirty way for councils to cut cost on their recycling responsibilities while charging the rate-payer for doing so.
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Posted by Pat Patterson on May 25, 2007 at 06:37 AM GMT+00:00 #
New Labour, New entrepreneur. Old rope, new money.
Posted by Robin Wilton on May 25, 2007 at 08:42 AM GMT+00:00 #