Rubbish policies
The government's recycling regulations are a waste of time and money, says Ross Clark. No wonder they are ignored 0 ver the past few weeks, the Cambridgeshire countryside where I live has resembled Dante's Inferno. The horizon has been punctuated by plumes of acrid black smoke rising from farmyards and corners of isolated fields. Come to think of it, no matter where I've been in the English countryside lately there have been plumes of smoke and an omnipresent tang of burnt plastics.
I guessed the reason, and a call to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed it: it's the result of the government's latest initiative on recycling and waste disposal. Next year new rules will prevent farmers disposing of their waste on their farms. No more shall they be allowed to bury their old fertiliser bags on their land or burn them along with last year's rotten straw, or dilute their used sheep-dip and spray it on the land. Instead, they will have to have all waste disposed of in licensed waste-disposal sites.
I wouldn't choose to argue with the purpose of the new laws, which is laudable. Nobody wants the countryside strewn with fertiliser bags and drenched in sheep-dip. Of course it would be better if farmers were made to dispose of waste properly and recycle it where appropriate. The problem is that the rules for disposing of waste are becoming so tortuous, and the costs so unreasonable, that it comes as little surprise that farmers should seek to dispose of their farm waste in one last, nationwide bonfire before the new rules come in.
There is no greater source of pollution in modern Britain than the government's environmental policy. They are all terribly well-meaning, these recycling schemes, these landfill taxes, all this licensing of waste dumps. The only trouble is that they are making things worse. Take fly-tipping, which has increased by 40 per cent in the past two years. Rubbish is being dumped in lay-hys, fields and woods at a bewildering rate. Between April and July this year there were 55,000 incidents of fly-tipping in Yorkshire alone. It isn't just the countryside, either. There have been cases of gangs renting warehouses on business parks, filling them to the ceiling with waste and doing a runner.
There is a straightforward reason for this illegal dumping. The rise of the landfill taxes and the decline in the number of licensed dumps have greatly increased the cost of disposing of waste properly, and provided a huge incentive to chuck it over the nearest hedge. The chances of fly-tippers being caught are minimal, and even when they are caught the punishments are so light that the dumpers are able to treat them as just one more business expense. You've got to be a bit stupid to do what John Hutcheson, a carpet-fitter from the village of Benwick, Cambridgeshire, did: he left an invoice number on a cardboard box which he dumped along with carpet and underlay on a grassy track near Whittlesey, an offence for which he was fined £150 at Peterborough magistrates' court in September. I don't argue with his conviction, but it isn't hard to see how he arrived at the decision to dump the carpet illegally. I rang up Fenland District Council and asked an officer what Mr Hutcheson should have done with it. As a tradesman he was forbidden to dump it in a 'household waste disposal site'; these facilities are now only to be used by householders disposing of waste from their own homes. Instead, I was told, 'he should have rung us up and we would have sent somebody out in a van to inspect the waste. For this service, we charge £20 per hour per person we send, because we might need to send more than one person, and an extra £10 an hour for the van. Then we would give him a price for disposing of it, which in the case of a carpet would be £35 a tonne.'
In other words, given the remoteness of his business, Mr Hutcheson could easily have run up a bill of £150 disposing of the carpet legally, mostly to pay for council waste inspectors to drive around the countryside. Had Mr FIutcheson's waste been of a hazardous nature, he would have had far greater difficulty and far greater expense: since July there have been just 12 sites in the country licensed for the disposal of hazardous waste, none at all in Scotland or Wales, with the result that hazardous loads of waste are making long journeys by road.
In theory a landfill tax is a good idea, in that it provides an incentive to recycle or re-use goods. Yet in reality the tax is costing general taxpayers more money than it raises from companies with waste to dispose of. Councils in north London last year spent £1 million clearing up the 70,000 tonnes of construction waste which were dumped illegally. Yet the landfill tax which would have been incurred had the material been dumped legally was just £135,000.
There is an obvious solution which would give businesses an incentive to cut down on waste but without providing them with an incentive to burn it or dump it illegally. Landfill tax should be applied at the stage of manufacture or import of goods and should cover the full cost of disposing of the item in a landfill site, and any associated environmental costs. When the product has reached the end of its useful life, the state should then dispose of it for free. if, however, you recycle the goods, then whoever owns the goods at that point should be refunded the landfill tax.
Of course it is too simple a solution to appeal to this government, which has made an art-form of convoluted rules and taxes. Rather. Defra is intent on compounding the problem. Its next big idea is to charge householders for putting into wheelie bins any material which could have been recycled. Residents in Barnet, north London, where a 'twin bin' recycling scheme was introduced this year, have already been threatened with 11,000 fines for failing to sort out their cardboard and plastic. The government is also considering charging householders directly for the weekly dustcart visit. The results are utterly predictable: diligent people will sort out their rubbish, but many will simply dump it in other people's gardens or wherever else they find convenient.
A similar scheme in Ireland has led to riots: ten were jailed after scuffles in Dublin last October. But sooner go down fighting than suffer what residents of Sudbury. Suffolk, have had to put up with. In common with a number of local authorities, the district council of Babergh recently attempted to discourage home-owners from filling their dustbins by reducing the visit of the dustmen to once a fortnight. The result? 'We've got maggots crawling out of our bins,' says councillor Albert Pearce. Once Sudbury has gone down with an outbreak of bubonic plague or two, maybe someone will come round to realising that the government's environmental policy has not been an unqualified success.
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