Recycling - a waste of time....

9 February 2013

...I have been saying it for a long time and now it has been confirmed, your recycling ends up in landfill, well a lot of it does anyway.  Who says so?  DEFRA, the most authorative source there is on this.

The only stuff I bother to re-cycle is paper and that is only because it is convenient to me.  I would bet a lot of that end up in landfill as well.

So all that time and all that inconvenience, all these ugly bins that blight our streets - it is a waste of time.

Yes - we do have a problem with rubbish and I have no problem with the principals of recycling, far from it.  But I do have a problem with how it is being operated and how the emphasis is placed on householders.  It needs to be tackled at the distribution end, all that excessive packaging on so many products.  That is where the emphasis must go and why not bring back deposits on bottles?

My advice - don't bother with it.  If we mugs did not play ball then they will have to re-think what they do.

• Guest 725 wrote:
  This is why I'm probably the only one in my street without those ridiculous bins outside of my house.
  The outcome of all this green let's save the planet because big boy says We're in danger of dying because of global warming environmentalists are nice people who love animals and are not greedy evil right wing fascists like Hitler David Attenborough is a lovely man blah, blah, blah is that not only is it costing us millions in having to buy the bins but by sending rubbish to landfill local councils have to pay huge fines.
  As it stands the fines are set at £84 per tonne. It's cost Worcestershire County Council alone £6 million - think about that, that's just one county council.
  Anyone ever thought about who makes those ugly recycling bins which make our towns and cities look positively third World? - A German company called Schneider. Reminds me of wind turbines which are all made abroad. Did anyone mention screwdriver economy under the Tories?
  For those worried about the "evils" of carrier bags think about this.
  Each 120 litre size wheelie bin contains the equivalent of many thousands of carrier bags. Weird eh? And the EU want the carrier bag outlawed.
  Never, ever trust anyone who calls their self an an environmentalist.
  It puts them in the same category as a labour, liberal or conservative politician.
• howard mcsweeney1 wrote:
  philip
  
  the plastic bags are a menace to wildlife, once swallowed they cannot eat and eventually die.
  
  those bins look a total eyesore in the picture, glad i don't have them.
• Guest 710 wrote:
  I question the unsightliness and absence of utility of that garden bench, but at least it is another lease of life for some materials that would otherwise be discarded to land-fill, and we can't have that. Can we?
  
  Yes, the current thinking on recycling is wrong-headed, but I blame you and your ilk Barry for most of this.
  Forever sucking-up to new generation-after-generation of the bean counters that masquerade as business people these days. This unity of focus upon money and profits at all costs carries with it the utter necessity of increased supervision and regulation, anchored in the mire of the past by incessant bickering over "costs to business" and a righteously casual attitude to paying the tax to cover such regulation.
  Yes, let us be realistic, as much of the world is, and many of the emerging vibrant economies are. Let us burn more of our waste to generate power and heat locally: something that could turn garden-waste collection into a useful commodity that could again be free at the point of collection.
  But, to bring forward any advantageous scheme to turn our waste to our advantage will require each and all of us to get the rubbish-sorting habit. We all have our part to play.
• Guest 725 wrote:
  Yes that's very true Howard but on the other hand cats are responsible for the untimely deaths of millions of birds, wind turbines also kill bats and birds and of course We all eat wildlife every day of the year in the food We buy.
  I understand the point you make but environmentalism is such a mixed up jumble of utopian ideas many of which date back to the Victorian era and in the main consider Mankind as a menace.
  Back to the bin debate isn't is odd that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who owned up to this recycling scandal, are the very same department charged with protecting the public from, say, the illegal practice of substituting horse meat for beef in the food We eat.
  Oh no, of course, they were much too busy protecting our planet from warming to concern themselves with such trivialities.
• Guest 730 wrote:
  I certainly agree about the bins. Most people seem to have got used to them now but I still hate them. Mine are long gone but I still have to walk past them everywhere I go and it's not just Dover, the whole country seems to be blighted by these ugly plastic monstrosities.
• Andy B wrote:
  I agree,i think its a waste of time.A good friend of mine who worked at the tip told me that the recycled waste would often end up as landfill.Then you have all the extra trucks needed to collect the recycling,hence more air pollution so how is this saving the planet?I think its more about acheiving government targets than anything else.
• Guest 725 wrote:
  I give up. So much for Cameron's visit to Brussels being a victory for common sense.
  I've heard of fraud but not on a scale as big as this:
  
  http://www.thegwpf.org/brussels-control-e250-billion-green-lobby/
• Guest 710 wrote:
  Just plain old Tory tripe Philip, dressed-up to look UKIP-esque. Thus boosting Dave's cred, and using the usual yet awful "mega-money-down-the-drain" drivel.
  Used wisely, such funding could achieve the redeployment of the recycling ethos complained of all across this page.
  I hear that Dave's miracle-working will not only lead to an increase in our funding of the EU, but has led to the downgrading of research and other growth helping areas of EU work. What is good for Dave leaves us all worse of...so no change at all there.
• Guest 725 wrote:
  Indeed Tom. Never trust a tory. Mind you that goes for liberals and labour. There is no real difference between them all.
  Personally I'm against recycling in general except for materials such as aluminium which certainly saves on costs and energy. Glass, to some extent, has it's uses for road surfacing as in instance.
  As for the rest (plastic, paper, cardboard, food waste) just burn it or bury it.
  The cost benefit analysis proves that recycling these materials merely waste fuel in terms of their transportation, energy consumed by machinery which sorts them into their various end destination and does no more than give people a nice warm glow and feel-good factor.
  Most amateur greenies , by that I mean those naive householders who consider themselves earnest and righteous members of society because they display their recycling credentials by way of the amount of bins proudly displayed outside their front doors are merely a manifestation of an earlier movement swayed by propaganda who deliberately hacksawed the metal fences in their front gardens in order to help the war effort during world war two.
  The only people who profited from this were the scrap metal merchants. The iron railings and saucepans given to help the war effort were absolutely unsuitable to build tanks, weapons and aeroplanes.
  To suggest that their noble attempts to fight the Nazis might be folly would probably met with suspicions that one might be a fifth columnist.
  Time has moved on but to suggest that recycling is a complete waste of time and money has been met by the same pious and ignorant views from those who partake in this very religious act of penance.
• Guest 698 wrote:
  A bit harsh there, Philip. True recycling is what our grandparents did. In those days it was called make-do-and-mend. Food waste went on the compost heap and was used to feed the vegetable garden. Old newspapers were used as fire lighters. Worn out sweaters were unravelled and re-knitted into something fashionable. Bottles were all reusable and went back to the pub or grocers for a refund of the 3d deposit. Buttons were removed from old clothes and saved for future use while the cloth went to the rag and bone man. Old cars went to the local scrappie and people who needed parts for their old banger turned up in overalls with their own tools and helped themselves, paying on the way out for what they had taken. In the absence of electronic media there was a ready market for secondhand books. You didn't buy your food in fancy plastic packaging so nothing to throw away there.
  
  Apart from tin cans there was very little to throw away. But nowadays we've turned into a throwaway society.
• Guest 698 wrote:
  And don't blame the politicians, we have the best that money can buy. It's the civil servants and Euro-jobsworths who deserve our ridicule.
• Guest 725 wrote:
  So Peter, when was the last time you lit a fire with newspaper? Can you honestly say that you have, even once in your life, unraveled and re-knitted an old sweater? Old cars still go to the scrap yard - that's what keeps my car on the road.
  We are a throwaway society but that's because We choose to buy produce that is contained within a package. Without packaging how are we to be protected from germs getting onto our horse burgers?
  As far as not blaming politicians I think you're wide of the mark there. The politicians have the power to shrink the size of the civil service, especially the Mandarins in Whitehall, but choose not to do so. In fact this present coalition has increase their ranks and their trillion pound pensions.
• Guest 698 wrote:
  I have never recycled a sweater but my mother did and my wife has done a good many. In years gone by I have often crawled over a pile of wrecked cars looking for a part but nowadays elf 'n safety denies me that pleasure. They With The Official Qualifications now have to dismantle the vehicles under strict safety conditions, clean them up and stack them on shelves. Fires- I still light log fires on a daily basis with screwed up newspaper, liberally dosed with used cooking oil. Works wonders. Recycles the cooking oil too. You missed the irony in my comment re: politicians.
• Guest 725 wrote:
  You're nearly right Peter but I didn't miss the point about politicians. They love it when people make jokes like that - it makes them seem human and tends to displace any real loathing we have of them.
  Ed Davey is on the Sunday politic show tomorrow and Andrew Neil is renowned for his loathing of wind farms. Should be interesting.