"I'm waiting for riots in the streets"

That's the headline on a Guardian piece on recycling. To be honest, so am I actually: for the whole push to recycle, at least the push that we recycle much more than we do now, is a hugely expensive scam forced upon us. The direct method is via the European Union, insisting that we must raise the percentage of our waste that we recycle rather than landfill, the mechanism being that we're not allowed to open new landfill sites, must pay ever rising fees for the ones we have and fines to the EU if, under the influence of all those sticks, we insist on still not recycling.

The reason behind all of this is simply that some have got religion. That recycling is, in and of itself, a good thing and that we must therefore do more of it. The sad part is that this last is not true. Some recycling is undoubtedly a good thing. Some more is a good thing depending upon how you account for non market externalities but there's another group that is positively bad in both environmental and economic effects and therefore we really shouldn't be doing them. You'll not be surprised to find that yes, we are being forced into doing things in that last group.

"I'm afraid change is unpopular," says Phillip Ward, director of the Waste Resources Action Programme (Wrap - get it?), the government's chief advisory body on the issue. "We're moving from an easy, familiar system where we just slung everything into a sack and once a week someone came and took it away for us - we neither knew nor cared where - to one where we actually have to do something. Some people will always find that difficult, for whatever reason."

While all of that is true, it's rather dodging the essential question: why do we have to do something? Why do we have to change the system?

Having raised that proportion to 33% in eight years, Britain - along with the rest of the EU - is now looking at a target of recycling 50% of its household waste by 2020.

Yes, but why have such targets been set? That's the bit that it is almost impossible to get an answer to other than "but recycling's good, isn't it?"

For others, it's the only way forward. "The bin fairy is dead," proclaims a breezy Paul Bettison, Tory leader of Bracknell Forest borough council and, as chairman of the Local Government Association's environment board, the nation's number one bin baron (or, if you prefer, trash tsar). "From now on we're all going to have to do a little bit of her work, and that's all there is to it.

In a just world Bettison would already be back up against the wall simply for that breezy condescention. One point that I've made (and sadly, no one else has) is that when all this kicked off, our waste disposal system costs us £1.6 billion a year and there were worried that this cost would double. So we've replaced it with a system where everyone has to do that "little bit of work" in sorting and preparing their rubbish for recycling. The cost, in time spent (and of course we do indeed need to put a financial cost on such time spent) by people in such preparation is higher than the total cost of the previous system. Yes, really, just and only the cost of preparing materials for recycling is higher than the total waste disposal system of a few years ago.

(Do the numbers yourself. There are 24 million households, US research shows that a full recycling programme, including garden waste, takes each household 45 minutes a week. Multiply those hours up by 52 weeks and the average wage of £10 an hour....yes, it's a very large number indeed.)

Bettison again "Look, anyone calls us up to complain they can't fit all their rubbish in their non-recyclables bin, we offer to send someone round and empty it onto a tarpaulin in their garden, show them what they could have recycled. They don't have to do it very often."

But of course what has still not been explained is why they should recycle these goods.

The bin baron's riposte is typically robust. "To those who say they can't do it," says Bettison, "I say they have to. The days of easy waste disposal are over. No change is not an option.

Look, before we have the revolution right now and start handing out those last cigarettes, could you, please, Mr, Bettison, just deign to tell us why this change has to happen?

To those who say it's too complicated, I say it really isn't rocket science. To those who say waste food smells, if you've got a garden, there are ways of reducing kitchen waste to little more than water, at home. It all just takes a bit of extra effort, that's all - and it should even lead to lower council tax bills."

Why should we have to make that extra effort?

For here's some little home truths about recycling that you don't get told. For example, disposable nappies and washable ones: they have about the same effect on emissions and energy usage. Recycling green glass is actually creating more emissions and the use of greater resources than simply throwing it in a hole in the ground. There's good evidence that using a wormery rather than landfilling food and garden waste creates more greenhouse gases. Yes. really, more.

And as to recycling paper: I thought we were all trying to work out ways of dumping carbon underground these days?

Just to reiterate: some recycling makes good and simple economic sense. Some makes sense when you think about the environmental externalities (greenhouse gases and so on). Yet there's a third group of recycling activities, things that don't make sense in either economic or environmental terms.and, yes, sadly, we are being forced to do that third group of things as well.

I, for one, would like to know why we are being so forced and I rather look forward to the upcoming "riots in the streets" so that the powers that be insisting we do so finally have to explain why.