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Another scheme to overcomplicate the charging of services in the name of promoting recycling is being discussed on the BBC News website: BBC NEWS | UK | Bugged bins to promote recycling.

This is wrong for many reasons.

The main one being that the worst materials to landfill, plastics and polystyrene packaging, weigh next to nothing, so cost nothing to throw away! However, heavy inert materials like glass and paper—which are required to stabilise landfill sites—will cost a small fortune to dispose of.

Then you have to take into account the fact that people could dispose of their waste elsewhere, either into some unfortunate neighbour’s bin—or more likely—by fly tipping. Which will have a much greater environmental and financial cost associated with it.

There is also the fact that there are the extra administration costs associated with administering these schemes, and the fact that people will be reluctant to pay (what they will assume is) a surcharge for a service they already pay for.

There is no easy solution.

We need, somehow, to make people wake up to the fact that we cannot go on living in such an unsustainable fashion. We also need to prevent less developed countries from aspiring to live in the unsustainable “nirvana” that we currently enjoy.

How do we do this? By small increments, perhaps. While recycling one can, bottle or newspaper makes no appreciable difference; us not recycling anything is certainly not going to solve the problem. We need to persuade everybody to do a little bit: to recycle where and what they can. Only once this becomes the norm will it make a large difference, but this has to start somewhere.

This will not save the planet. But it will help to buy us valuable time before we destroy it to rethink our actions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday 5th September 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. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.