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An article on the BBC NEWS states that Rubbish collection ‘may be taxed’:

The proposals could allow councils to charge residents for the amount of waste they produce, and other possibilities include charging less to greener households and those who separate their waste.

What they don’t seem to have considered is that this will just increase the amount of fly tipping. People who produce a lot a of waste are less likely to be those who actually care about the environment, and so may be tempted to get rid of excess rubbish by other means, such as fly tipping.

Charging by weight is also a poor idea, as many of the most environmentally damaging items, such as plastics, weigh next to nothing. Heavy inert materials like glass, have little impact on landfill other than filling them up quickly, but would be disproportionately expensive to dispose of under this scheme.

A possible solution might be to only collect general waste at half the current frequency, and using the cost savings to increase recycling facilities and collections. This way people get better recycling at no added cost, other than the minimal effort of sorting recyclable materials into a separate bin.

This entry was posted on Friday 16th June 2006 in Engineering, Politics and tagged Engineering, environmental, landfill, Politics, recycling, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.