WASTE OF TIME
Ross Clark reveals that the recycling middle
classes are doing nothing to repair that worrying hole at the North Pole
ALONG with the Guardian, the bottle bank is one of the great symbols of English middle-class guilt. You have only to stand in a supermarket carpark on a Saturday morning to see mothers, fathers and their kids carefully dropping the hard- ware of last week's dinner parties into the appropriate plastic drums. This is environ- mental conscience by the Volvo-bootload, the Blue Peter generation grown up into nice, sensible adults.
Those who live near bottle banks will tell you a different story: of being kept awake by the sound of shattering glass thanks to midnight dog-walkers who have just discovered a few empties behind the fridge, of a constant tang of vinegar, and of pavements littered with shards of glass. But no matter; there is Planet Earth to be saved, and recycling, as we all know, is the only way to ensure that we leave our chil- dren an inhabitable world.
And it's no longer just bottle banks. There are newspaper banks, clothing banks and aluminium-can banks. If you aren't yet popping your rubbish into recycling bins, you soon will be. The government, partly on EU instruction and partly on its own initia- tive, has decreed that within the next three years the amount of domestic waste recycled in Britain should increase from 9 per cent to 17 per cent. By 2015 a third of all domestic waste will have to be recycled. The onus will not just be on consumers: by 2016 newspa- per publishers will have a duty to ensure that their readers are chucking 65 per cent of their print-runs into a recycling bin.
To achieve its objective, the government wants the recycling gospel to reach beyond the middle classes: it envisages 'supermarket reward schemes', whereby those who bring the most rubbish to be recycled will be rewarded with vouchers. But the fact is that there aren't enough takers for even the small proportion of rubbish being recycled in Britain. For example, there is virtually no market for green glass in this country. Last week's dutifully recycled Chianti bottle will probably soon be on its way to Argentina. In fact, 20 per cent of the 450,000 tonnes of glass collected annually in bottle banks is exported to South America.
The problem with surplus glass has become so acute that the government has been forced to dream up a new use for it, one which makes local councils' claim to `recycle' glass look a bit of a con. In future, waste glass is likely to be crushed into pow- der and used as the underbed for the fifth lane of the M25. So it's just as well that the government has launched a new road-build- ing programme to absorb the surplus.
And what about last week's Daily Tele- graphs — or even Guardians — that you so carefully stuffed into the recycling bin? There is an increasing chance that it will be shipped off to Taiwan. European paper-mills can no longer absorb the amount of paper being collected. Consci- entious Europeans are dumping so much in recycling bins that by 2005 they will be adding to a waste-paper mountain at the rate of four million tonnes a year.
Although waste paper is currently fetch- ing £45 a tonne, there have been times over the past couple of years when the bottom has fallen out of the market and waste- paper merchants have begun charging to take it away. 'Several local authorities have had to abandon recycling schemes because they were making a loss and were taking money from other services,' says Stuart McLanaghan of the Environmental Service Association, which represents the waste- recycling industry. 'There is a cultural problem: people still see virgin' material as the best.'
Part of Europe's waste-paper mountain lies on the floor in the office of Dr Lynd- hurst Collins, a geographer at the University of Edinburgh who has studied extensively `I wanted a sex change. But I failed the intelligence test.' the economics of waste recycling. 'The com- panies that are supposed to be taking it away are using my office for free storage until the price of waste paper goes up,' he says.
That in itself does not concern him great- ly. The trade in international waste is, after all, perfectly legitimate — even if the public are being bullied by government into supply- ing the raw material free of charge. What does worry him is that the government is blindly sponsoring an industry that may be having an adverse effect on the environ- ment. Paper-recycling plants in the Far East are not subject to the same stringent emis- sions regulations as paper factories in Europe. Furthermore, paper is a renewable resource and therefore there is no particular need to preserve it. Burning it does not make any net contribution to global warm- ing. Yet a fleet of ships is belching its way around the world laden with waste paper. This year the international trade in waste paper will handle 17 million tonnes of the stuff. Transporting waste paper large dis- tances around the globe and then pulping and turning it back into paper requires more energy than manufacturing paper from scratch, and most of that energy comes from fossil fuel. Environmentalists might consider this when they brood about the hole in the Arctic ice sheet at the North Pole.
They might also consider the serious prob- lem that arises out of a conflict between two arms of the government's waste-disposal strategy. Apart from its target of recycling one third of domestic waste by 2015, the gov- ernment also aims to be incinerating a third of all waste by that date (leaving the remain- ing third to be dumped in landfill sites, cur- rently the most common way of disposing of waste in this country). The incineration of waste — a widespread practice on mainland Europe — is practical, but worries over pol- lution can be overcome only if the furnaces can be kept at high temperatures, at which they burn more efficiently. The best way to ensure that furnaces are kept hot is to burn large quantities of waste paper in them. If people cease to dispose of their newspapers by throwing them in their dustbins we may find ourselves in the same bizarre situation as the German authorities, who have to buy up waste paper, destined for recycling, in order to burn it up in their furnaces.
`Environmentally, it is beneficial to recy- cle paper into cardboard,' says Dr Lynd- hurst Collins, tut otherwise a global policy of incinerating paper close to where it has been used would make more sense. The incinerators can also be used to generate electricity. The government has set itself a target of generating 10 per cent of all ener- gy from renewable sources; there is no way it can achieve that target if it is going to recycle rather than burn waste paper.'
Calling green-minded folk everywhere. Want to contribute to global warming? Want to donate some free material to Mr Prescott's motorway-widening pro- gramme? Then get ye down to your near- est recycling bin.
Previous page
