Bishop Hill Recycling recycling
Another dodgy green claim that I've looked at from time to time is the environmental and economic benefits of recycling.
In Roger Harrabin's latest piece, we hear once again about the resources expended on recycling, and once again we hear that there is little or no market for all the product of all this spending.
Shifting priorities on waste presents many challenges. Many councils have moved to co-mingled waste in which domestic waste is sent to recycling centres where items are separated by air-blowing machines like giant tumble-driers.
The system is cheaper than separation by hand, but can leave fragments of waste in the wrong recycling streams - glass in paper is a particular problem.
Another challenge is developing markets for recycled materials. The UK waste industry is fragmented with different councils adopting very different approaches.
Environmentalists do love waste don't they?
Reader Comments (45)
Can some economist explain why the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead pays (with vouchers) residents per kilo of recyclable waste collected? This means that bottles have far more value per unit than aluminium cans and encourages us to buy wine in bottles rather than beer in cans. Is there any logic to this?
I can see a logic, but not neccessarily an economic one. Quartz is a virtually unlimited resource. Aluminium is not.
My domestic rubbish gets collected once a fortnight, whereas the recycling gets collected once a week. I put recycling out once a fortnight or so as I don't produce enought to warrant doing it weekly and there's no harm in storing it up. In summer I could do with domestic rubbish being collected once a week to avoid smell and possibly attracting vermin. There's no logic used.
If it was not for filling the empty ships with recyclables to return to China after delivering their goods, most so called recycling would be totally uneconomic. As it is most coloured glass is ground up to make cullet to be used in building roads, whilst paper can only be repulped a few times before it cannot be reused. As for plastics, most end up as street signs or garden furniture only being 'recycled' once or as backing for carpets. The cost to local aurthorities [us in the end] of collecting and handling far outweights the return by a factor of three. In a country worried about energy security it is foolish in the extreme not to incinerate the waste to produce electricity.
There had long been recycling of various items, sump oil, car batteries, metals, newspaper and there were developed markets.
The problems came with high level government directives affecting landfill and mandating targets. Hence the various stories of waste being held in storage, or shipped to China to be put in landfill.
I think the main purpose of the recycling schemes is that the government finds it convenient to have us performing a ritual and feeling guilty if we don't.
Ironic that such a wasteful system should be called green ! but then again it gives councils a way of sticking big recycling capacity figures on their leaflets and EU targets even though most of the green bins are idle for 6months of the year and the rest mostly ends up in landfill !
Here's a June 1996 article from the NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html
Nothing has changed and nothing has been learned.
The current level of recycling is no more than a bandwagon that the greenies jumped on when some EU countries started to run out of landfill space.
Since the UK (as far as I know) digs many more cubic metres of sand, gravel, coal and other assorted materials out of the ground in any given year than it generates in waste the urgent need to recycle does not exist and certainly in countries like France (where I am currently living) to suggest that they are "running out" of landfill space is ludicrous.
In our local villages we are encouraged to recycle magazines, glass, cardboard and plastic but each commune sets its own priorities and if you choose simply to put out a wheelie bin or even black plastic bags instead or as well then that will be emptied without comment.
The French certainly do not seem to agonise over these matters as the British do and for sure the idea of fining people for using the wrong container or not sorting rubbish properly or putting the bin in the wrong place or at the wrong time would very quickly end with the steps of the local mairie becoming the repository for the nastiest and smelliest of the contents thereof. (In these matters the French tend not to do subtlety,either!)
There are certainly arguments in favour of recycling but it never seems to occur to the really obsessed enviro-nut that landfill is itself a form of recycling since it effectively brings the land back into productive use and is a much better use of the earth's resources (if that is really what their concerns are) than shipping unwanted goods halfway round the world to have them disposed of there.
@cosmic - you refer of course to the EC Landfill Directive, which on an annual basis increases the tax due by councils (ie you and me) for sending waste to landfill and sends them scurrying off into the land of fortnightly bin collections, "zero waste" and token recycling efforts. Utter madness.
BH
When you get your review copy of Chasing Rainbows back from the missus, you must take a look at the chapter on recycling. Worstall quantifies just how much time we all spend sorting out the recycling prior to collection, then conducts a cost benefit analysis.
The results are not favourable to proponents of recycling.
Think Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling
"The claims for recycling rest on an assumed, if not always articulated, moral imperative rather than on trade-offs or costs. But underlying this claim, for many people at least, is some murky idea that recycling 'uses up' fewer resources than making things from scratch."
"Environmentalists do love waste don't they?"
They also seem to embrace the concept of "creating markets". They use the same rhetoric when they talk about "creating [green] jobs".
If there was a need, if there was value, if there was any logic or sense, a market would appear.
Longer term, I'm interested to see what these eco-warriors on various councils have to say when all the dreadful 'low energy' lamps, containing mercury vapour, finish up in landfill (oh, yes they will) - and the country discovers mercury leaking into groundwater...
Suoermarket bags, I put all my rubbish in them and they all go to the tip, if I can't get any I have to buy black bags.
Is there any logic to this.
David -
The answer to your question would seem obvious -- it becomes another environmental cause! And at that time, LED lamps become mandated. Plus they issue lots of contracts to clean up the landfills so contaminated. Can't you just see the green jobs being created?
[And yes, I'm being sarcastic in that last sentence.]
Do you want to see real recycling in action?
In Hungary twice a year you put out everything you no longer need on the street. Beds, mattresses, fridges. Anything other than building waste. The date is advertised in advance.
Before the council grabber turns up, the Gypsies come out in force. The wife and kids go out on forage parties. If the wife finds something good, the kid stays and stakes a claim. Eventually the husband turns up in a 1980's Passat with no body panel the same colour, towing a trailer. The trailer is probably already two metres high with stuff, yet he still manages to get more on.
By the time the council grabber turns up, there is very little left.
Positive recycling in action.
Of course walking around the streets at this time, you start thinking "Look at what they have thrown out, I wouldn't mind that". However being seen as a Gypsy in Hungary is not a positive thing. So you leave it.
It's my observation that if you see anything billed as eco-friendly:
1) It doesn't work very well.
2) It's expensive.
3) A moment's thought shows it does nothing to reduce emissions, save the Whale, save the planet or save anything else and likely works against these things. It's just a scam to get you to accept paying extra for a second rate product or service.
Government enforced recycling schemes fit in with this exactly.
Recycling does have its place. However, it should be driven by economic forces. Both waste oil and aluminum are valuable resources. On the other hand careful disposal of dangerous materials like batteries and poisonous materials make economic sense as it is cheaper than the later clean up.
There’s so much to agree with here, I find it hard to add anything useful. I will just say that the vendetta again carrier bags is yet another example of misguided ‘greenery’. The amount of plastic packing that fills those bags on a normal supermarket excursion will exceed the volume of waste in the bag (which is as thin/cheap as practicable) by more than an order of magnitude. The amount of plastic in a single 4-pint milk carton would make 40 carrier bags.
We were better at this fifty years ago...
Here are two classic views from the US (2003 & 2008) condemning the ideology of recycling -
http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps28.pdf
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2008/07/penn-and-teller-not-fans-of-recycling.html
One wonders how many ways good intentioned humans can be fooled.
I might sound like I'm against the grain here, but all recycling is not equal, local recycling of some waste is both practical and cheaper IMO.
I have furnished my house from the recycling centre, I'm not talking rubbish here either, I'm talking about solid oak 50/60's furniture, pitch pine internal doors, hand made kitchen units with marble tops, all the bricks for my new inglenook, dozens of perfectly good tools etc. sales of which pay the site workers wages. Mind you, I can remember rummaging around the tip with my dad on a Sunday morning 40 odd years ago, can't do that these days.
We have a compost collection bucket in the kitchen, 4 compost bins in the garden, I make about 4 ton of compost a year, which is about 80 bags I don't have to buy at the garden centre, this is all recycled into food, which I don't have to buy at the market. All my paper and cardboard waste is used in the garden, I could use a ton more. We get 95% of our clothes from charity shops, this is sensible cost effective recycling.
Saves me a fortune, probably why I'm debt free with a nice homestead. So all you fashion victims out there, do keep buying whatever is in vogue this week, and throwing perfectly good stuff away at the recycling centre so we don't have to get into debt to live comfortably :)
It's all a massive job creation scheme for the tax-suckling classes.
Here's a listing of around 1500 "environmental" job vacancies.
You have to look pretty hard to find one that contributes anything to the sum of human happiness.
http://www.redgoldfish.co.uk/jobs/environmental-security-hs
OT: Am looking for testimonials to quantify an oft-made assertion:
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2011/01/13/raise-your-hand/
Frosty - so it’s you that’s destroying the economy! :-)
Steptoe and Son?
Frosty
I'm surprised they allow totting at your local tip (sorry, recycling centre). I once skip dived a pair of very good quality bentwood chairs at the Purley tip, only to be told that once in the skip they became the property of Croydon Council. When I remonstrated, the jobsworth said "I am obliged to explain the regulations to you, but I can't actually do anything about it."
They cleaned up a treat. I recommend half and half boiled linseed oil and meths, shaken up with enough vinegar to make an emulsion. Apply with 000 steel wool.
Now that's recycling.
Dreadnought
I have bought several "shopping bikes" from the local tip for a flat price of £10, for shopping and "student at university" use. All these recycled machines usually need is a new inner tube or similar and a bit of TLC and they are, if not exactly like new, safe enough to cycle into town to shop. The beauty of using such recycled cycles is that, unlike my proper bike, they don't need locking. I have never locked a shopping bike nor have I ever had one stolen!
Now that's what I call proper recyling cycling!
Dreadnought Jan 13th 3:43pm -
You were lucky. I had a Dyson DC01 vacuum cleaner. After many years supporting such "legacy" products, Dyson are now only supplying a limited range of spares (eg wheels & belts). I needed one of the parts no longer produced and was delighted to see an identical cleaner on top of a full skip at Horsham Civic Amenity Centre (ie recycling centre). I was told that it wasn't worth the guy's job to allow me to retrieve it. I wasn't happy at that but had to accept it. I was really enraged when I returned to the tip later the same day to see them crushing all the items in the "small electric appliances" skip. They don't even try to recycle them!
I did get another Dyson for spares form Freecycle so all was not lost. For those who don't know about Freecycle, it's an organised version of Frosty's method - http://uk.freecycle.org/
The only reason to recycle glass, mostly bottles, is to prevent them finishing up in landfill. The economics of recycling them is just not there. There are unlimited supplies of the raw material, silicon. Only white glass is recycled, at an energy saving of a mere 15%. Nobody wants brown or green glass and it is usually crushed and used in road building. A lot is shipped to Brazil for some reason.
The only materials really worth recycling are aluminum; large energy saving, and some plastics. Bearing in mind the cost, and the C02, if you believe, of huge trucks pounding around the country the reality is probably a net loss of energy. But then it makes, environmentalists feel good.
Mike Post
Nice one. Do your local roads have recycle lanes?
Dreadnought
"Do your local roads have recycle lanes?" Some do, but when the road narrows, the recycle lanes stop and you end up in the crusher!
Jockdownsouth Jan 13, 2011 at 4:11 PM
That's exactly my experience of Civic Amenity Centres. They actively prevent useful things from being recovered and used. It's incredibly wasteful, and I don't believe much useful recycling goes in either.
Just another reason why I've got no patience whatsoever with local authority recycling schemes.
I heard of a careful person who lived economically, and carefully sorted and recycled, but was fined by the authorities anyway. His crime: not putting out enough rubbish for collection (so he must have been doing something wrong). And this was in the US...
It is a shame to think of all the poor dead polar bears, killed by good intentions.
Mike Post
There is a law of bike security that runs something like:
A 20lb bike needs a £100 lock, a 30lb bike needs a £10 lock, and a 40lb bike needs no lock.
Something similar probably applies to cars...
@ cosmic
if you see anything billed as eco-friendly...It's just a scam to get you to accept paying extra
Yes. This is well understood by economists and regularly applied by retailers. People are prepared to pay different prices for exactly the same thing. Retail laws normally require sellers to name and display one price to all, however. This means they lose the business of those who won't pay your price, and lose income from those who will pay your price but would have paid even more.
The solution is to offer options in the way the product is described or offered, so that those prepared to pay more step forward, identify themselves, and do so.
An example you can see any day is supermarket fish. There is usually a fish counter with a lot of slabs of fish artistically laid out on an attractive bed of ice. There is also usually a chiller cabinet display of ready-cut fish in polystyrene trays with cellophane over them.
The latter comes from the former counter and is priced cheaper. Fish sold off ice is perceived as worth more than prepacked fish.So the cheapskate buys the cheap skate (see what I did there?) and the Islingtonian buys a bespoke cut piece of the same thing for more money. The store offers both types so they can sell the same thing at two different prices. Everybody's happy.
Same with coffee. The futures price of coffee is about $2.40 per pound. There's about 15g of coffee in a Starbucks coffee, so the cost of the coffee is thus about £0.04. For an extra £0.10 you can have Fairtrade coffee instead. Does it cost £0.10 extra to provide it? No, it doesn't necessarily cost anything extra at all. Fairtrade guarantees growers a minimum price. If the wholesale market price exceeds that minimum, they just get the market price.They aren't necessarily paid more.
So why is Fairtrade coffee sold sold for 250% more than normal coffee? Because some people just want to pay more for their coffee whether it costs more or not. How much of the extra they pay reaches Fairtrade farmers? Approximately none.
Eco products? Same thing. They can be very expensive even though they don't work as toilet cleaners, or as solar powered garden lights, or as clothing, or whatever, because these are only examples of their ostensible purpose. Their real purpose, for which they actually do work, is to make the buyer feel good, for which it's worth paying a premium for useless rubbish.
On a fascistic scale, this is why there are people who believe in limiting CO2 emissions.
Great anecdote about Hungary, Jiminy Cricket - I really felt I learned something new today!
@ Justice4Rinka
if you see anything billed as eco-friendly...It's just a scam to get you to accept paying extra
Yes. This is well understood by economists and regularly applied by retailers. People are prepared to pay different prices for exactly the same thing.
----------------
People associate higher prices with better quality, and as a general rule it applies. My old headmaster explained it to us. He had a friend who owned a chain of clothes shops and who bought a lot of sweaters; they were the best quality he'd ever seen. At the usual mark up they were priced at 10 bob at late 60s pricing. They sold hardly any. The shop managers asked him what to do about them and he told them to set the price at £5 (very, very expensive for a sweater back then). They were sold out in a week and the customers wanted more.
Fairtrade I take to be a piece of feel-good nonsense. Organic this and that is much the same, but I'd pay extra for an inorganic lemon as it would be a curious thing indeed.
In this case I was thinking of paint, Dulux matt brilliant white emulsion. A decent quality paint that had been around for years and definitely better than own brand paint. Two 10L cans were bought to paint a large kitchen. The first can was like painting the walls with milk, it wouldn't cover the pencil marks used to mark up where the surface had to be made good. The second can was exactly what was expected.
We investigated the empty cans. The useless one had some twaddle about how it reduced emissions, a cover story for having less pigment. The good one had no such cant and a manufacture date a month or so earlier. Obviously the maker had decided on this profitable dodge with some eco-wibble to cover it and the two cans were bought at time of transition when there were old and new cans on the retailer's shelves.
No positive decision was made to buy an eco-friendly product and it took a close look to see that the product had changed significantly. Since it took much more paint and effort to achieve the same result, I doubt it was even eco-friendly. It was a straight con trick.
The next time I buy paint, I'll be much more circumspect and see what the makers have to say about about their products by email, because I'm certainly not about to waste more time with a rubbish product at a premium price and have some fairy story about how it's saving the planet.
"Eco products? Same thing. They can be very expensive even though they don't work as toilet cleaners, or as solar powered garden lights, or as clothing, or whatever, because these are only examples of their ostensible purpose. Their real purpose, for which they actually do work, is to make the buyer feel good, for which it's worth paying a premium for useless rubbish."
I make a point of advising everyone I know to ignore this foolishness and regard eco this or that as an indication that they are being conned. If it takes three times the amount and still barely does the job it's difficult to see how it's eco-friendly all considered. That the eco tag means rubbish is as least as good a general rule as "The higher the price, the better the quality".
"I once skip dived a pair of very good quality bentwood chairs at the Purley tip...Now that's recycling."
Actually, it's re-using, which is 100 times as effective as recycling.
"...So the cheapskate buys the cheap skate (see what I did there?)..."--J4R
I think that was the sole motivation for your comment.
"...I take to be a piece of feel-good nonsense. Organic this and that is much the same, but I'd pay extra for an inorganic lemon as it would be a curious thing indeed...."--cosmic
Organic is an anagram of "rig a con."
@cosmic: In this case I was thinking of paint, Dulux matt brilliant white emulsion. A decent quality paint that had been around for years and definitely better than own brand paint. Two 10L cans were bought to paint a large kitchen. The first can was like painting the walls with milk, it wouldn't cover the pencil marks used to mark up where the surface had to be made good. The second can was exactly what was expected.
We investigated the empty cans. The useless one had some twaddle about how it reduced emissions, a cover story for having less pigment. The good one had no such cant and a manufacture date a month or so earlier. Obviously the maker had decided on this profitable dodge with some eco-wibble to cover it and the two cans were bought at time of transition when there were old and new cans on the retailer's shelves.
No positive decision was made to buy an eco-friendly product and it took a close look to see that the product had changed significantly. Since it took much more paint and effort to achieve the same result, I doubt it was even eco-friendly. It was a straight con trick.
Absolutely. A total con by Dulux.
I had exactly the same experience. I'd made a cross channel trip to stock up on paint. Dulux white used to cover in one coat with a very good finish. After a friend and I found ourselves going over the walls a third time (ie as a result of the con, we had wasted a day of out lives) we wondered what we were doing wrong. We closely read the small print and found "the carbon footprint had been reduced by XX%" . (I can't remember the exact figure - it was something like 24%).
Total bullshit. Paint doesn't have a "carbon footprint" - it's not fuel. What Dulux meant is "we are reducing the pigment content by XX% which saves us money but gives you a crap result and requires far more of your time. But we think our customers are suckers, so up yours - sucker!"
Not only had we wasted out time - thank you Dulux - I had wasted a portion of the time and cost of a cross-channel materials-buying trip.
Guess what make of paint I shall never buy again? [Hint. Starts with "Du" and ends with "ux"]
I can't stand some of the absurd petty targets and regulations emanating from the EU that our petty officialdom thrives on, but we have drifted into a state of crazy overpackaging and disposable consumption habit. I've grown to appreciate that quality goods last far longer in the end. Especially hardware, other than electrical. There are some things that reached their design perfection a long time ago, and were so well made they last indefinitely- such as Georgian silver cutlery, carpentry hand tools and forge made specials, old china and antiques, (often cheaper than repros) even the original Aga cooker, and endless stuff like Singer sewing machines to be had for only £20-30.
Until you think about it, it's easy to forget that virtually every resource thats inorganic has to be mined and refined to purify it. And most of the easy best and richest seams lodes and deposits were exploited years ago. The USGS maintains a fairly comprehensive global assessment of known mineral reserves, and it is worth noting that many familiar metals are in the less than 50 year reserves category.
They also have a report on recycling, claiming that overall, recycling accounts for more than half of the U.S. metal supply by weight and roughly 40 percent by value. Its available from the following link,
http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/1196am/
Some of the BH readers should find a book titled "Rubbish: the Archeology of Garbage" by Rathje and Cullen to be of interest. They are a pair of archeologists who applied archeological techniques to several land fills in the U.S. Their interest was first piqued by the claim from the "environmental" community that our landfills were drowning in disposable diapers. Their findings showed that in fact disposable diapers constituted less than 1% of the waste stream. Paper, esp. newspapers, represented over 30% if memory serves and newsprint doesn't biodegrade in an anaerobic environment which is what exists in the lower layers of a land fill. They included a solid section on the economics of recycling that clearly shows that it is an uneconomical venture even with the value of the free labor that we are forced to provide being excluded from from the equation.
Cosmic / Martin A
Absolutely agree about Dulux. And many other brands of "eco-friendly" paint.
There are loads of other examples. The "bio-degradable " bags which aren't strong enough to safely carry a couple of bottles of wine - so you have to use two.
And the new "water saving" toilets. They have now developed one which only uses a litre of water. Haven't tried one but very much doubt it being a lot of use if you've had a few pints and a curry the night before. Even normal modern WCs need to be flushed several times.
Fortunately we are seldom short of water in the UK.
@ Martin Brumby,
If you go to buy eco-friendly paint (nails, wire, a CD player,light bulbs, or anything else) you expect to be paying extra for rubbish and are also expected to feel good about it. This was slyly slipped into the small print. They were adulterating the product but not saying so clearly, and the eco-twaddle was there as an excuse. So you may have been ripped off by buying water at paint prices, but there was some nonsense implying you were saving the planet by being ripped off to console you.
As for the bio-degradable bags, if they do what they say, they add to the CO2 content of the atmosphere a bit quick, as well as wasting a limited resource by having built-in obsolescence and being flimsy.
All this eco stuff is a con, because if they'd found a better, cheaper way of doing things, they'd just do it and everyone would buy it on its merits without any need for mealy mouthed words about the planet. Consider past developments such as shifting from candles to oil lamps to gas mantles, to incandescent light bulbs; people bought them because they were better than what had gone before. This is all a con trick to get people to buy things worse than went before.