How Not To Recycle

The Guardian has a long piece on how not to recycle. It's all about how Flanders is beavering away and making sure that lots and lots of things are being recycled, the remainder being incinerated rather than landfilled. A good thing you might think (my objections to that will come another day) but I'm afraid not.

UK figures for total amounts of household waste are roughly comparable with those of Flanders, but there are startling differences: Flanders' recycling rates of 72% in rural areas and over 60% in urban areas are among the highest in the world, dwarfing England's 28%.
Green types will of course cheer as they look at all those resources saved. Rational types will wonder what resources are used in the process of that "saving". For the one thing that is never counted in such plans is time. How much time is used by people having to sort their waste so that this recycling can be done? A few months back I phoned Defra to ask them what their estimate was and they said they had none. A trivial calculation shows that if each household takes 45 minutes a week to sort all household and garden waste then that cost is £4.5 billion  a year: larger than the cost of our entire waste disposal system at present.

Looking at any recycling system without stopping to look at this time issue is simply the wrong way to regard it. After all, what actually is the scarce resource? Potato peelings or the all too short hours of our lives?

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