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A crusade we can't afford to rubbish
Richard Darlington Richard Darlington is a member of the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank. A Zero-Waste UK, by Julie Hill, Ben Shaw and Hannah Hislop, is published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (www.ippr.org) and the Green Alliance (www.green-alliance.org.uk) next month.
BIG BROTHER is coming to get you! And this time he's looking through your bins…
Yes, councils across Britain have put microchips into half-a-million bins to see whether they can be used to weigh the rubbish we chuck away.
Why? Well, across the Yorkshire and Humber region, less than one in five tons of rubbish gets recycled. The rest ends up getting buried in landfill sites or going up in flames in an incinerator.
In terms of local variations, however, the difference is marked. In Richmondshire, Hull, Selby and Scarborough, just under one in 10 tons of rubbish gets recycled, but in Hambleton and Ryedale it's more than one in four tons.
Of course, the councils who bugged our bins should have told us what they were doing, but they did have the right idea.
Why should someone who painstakingly sorts their paper, plastic and glass pay the same for their rubbish collection as the person who chucks it all in the same bin without a thought? Wouldn't it be fairer if the cost of rubbish collection was taken off our council-tax bills and those people who recycled were rewarded with lower bills?
In Germany, where some local areas charge the equivalent of 18p-a-kilo for waste not recycled, the collection of recyclable waste has gone up to more than 65 per cent. In San Francisco, they now recycle three-quarters of their rubbish because they do the same.
Around the globe, "pay-as-you-throw" waste collection means that people are recycling more than we do in Britain. In fact, across Europe, Britain is bottom of the heap, along with Greece and Portugal.
Of course we need to be careful how we do it. There must be convenient and efficient recycling collection. We can't expect the elderly to haul their bottles down to the local tip. It needs to be door-to-door collection. And it needs to be simple to sort – green for glass, pink for paper, purple for plastic.
Most importantly, fly-tipping must be made as socially unacceptable as drink-driving and smoking around babies. And anyone tempted to dump waste in their neighbour's bin needs to get a large fine that makes it not worth getting caught.
This week, Sheffield Council started spot-checks to stop businesses dumping rubbish at the Blackstock Road, Longley Avenue West, Deepcar, Shiregreen and Beighton recycling centres. That kind of action is exactly what we need councils across the country to be doing: setting up fair rules and then policing them effectively.
None of this is rocket science, we just have to be ambitious about doing better. We don't actually pay a very high proportion of council tax for waste services, but we still expect the council to cart off whatever we throw out, without thinking where it all ends up.
But we also need to stop manufacturers and supermarkets wrapping organic vegetables in loads of packaging that you can't recycle. There's simply no sense in it.
At the moment, supermarkets seem to think that they are giving people what they want, but maybe people want the option of leaving all the packaging in the supermarket and putting their fruit and veg in a paper bag?
If we carry on as we are, we will need three planets' worth of resources to sustain our throw-away culture. We have to get better at recycling materials– not just newspapers, bottles and cans, but eventually everything.
Residents near Sheffield's Parkwood Springs are understandably worried about the amount of rubbish going into the landfill site and spoiling the view of the beautiful Peak District.
Unfortunately, however, because of our dilatory approach to recycling, we're going to need to keep burning and burying rubbish for a while yet.
But, if we increase the amount we recycle, we should be doing less and less of it every year
and there is no reason why we can't eventually aim to stop altogether.
This should be our ambition – zero waste.
In the 19th century, Britain led the Industrial Revolution because of our ingenuity and our creativity. Today, our throw-away culture gives us a new set of challenges but we should be confident that we can rise to meet them.
If everyone does their bit and we all chill out about microchips in our bins, we can make Britain a zero-waste country. And, in doing so, we can "keep Yorkshire tidy", we can preserve "Herriot country" and the beauty of the Dales and end landfill and incineration forever.
Creating a culture of recycling means making a small change to our lifestyles, but it will mean a big difference for our children.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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