Those Tory Recycling Plans

We've got the Tory Party's Quality of Life report coming this week and some of the ideas being trailed don't seem to be all that sensible (for a given value of sensible, of course). An insistence upon greater recycling efforts when it's arguable that some of the things already recommended do more damage than landfill does seem a little odd. But given my day job in the metals industry ths one seems more than odd:

They are also proposing regulations requiring can manufacturers to use only 100% aluminium...
Why? We've already got an efficient system for recycling aluminium cans. You can even speculate in UBC futures if you wish. The aluminium manufacturers are already set up to deal with the cans as they are. Why try to change something that already works?

It's also quite possibly true that this isn't something that can actually be done by the UK Government: even if it is, the European Union will insist that the current cans, as used in the other 26 member countries, must have freedom of access to the UK market. So we could, as a result of such regulations, need to have two entirely distinct recycling circuits. That really doesn't sound all that efficient.

So why is it being proposed?