The great recycling myth

My frail elderly mother has recently moved in with us in Epsom and in so doing has joined the 15 million people worldwide who spend their days sorting through rubbish. Mum, however, does not get paid $1 a day. She does it for nothing. This is because we now have five separate bins and every morning she and the other 10,000-plus members of Surrey’s army of housewives sort through their rubbish to make sure it all goes into the right one.

I am of course describing the phenomenon known as kerbside recycling, and Epsom Council would like you to think that it is good for the environment. But my day job is raising money for environmental projects, including waste plants, and I know that kerbside recycling is all a big con to save the public sector money. Everybody involved in the waste industry knows this simple fact: all rubbish can be sorted much more efficiently by machines without the need for any human intervention.

That may come as a surprise to you, but think about it for a moment. We are the generation that built the large hadron collider. Do you really think that it has been beyond human ingenuity to invent a simple and cheap machine that can distinguish a tin can from a glass bottle? Of course it hasn’t, and there is now a whole industry supplying clever bits of technology to separate your unsorted rubbish into the component parts of glass, metal, food, paper and plastic. One of my clients even has a machine that uses reflected light to distinguish between different types of plastic and different colours.

So given that these machines exist, why are we still sorting through our rubbish? The legislation behind kerbside recycling originates in Brussels, with the laudable aim of making Europe a ‘recycling society’.