Recycling - A waste of energy?

[Kymba]

I recycle everything i can even though we only have a small blue box to use and Blue Bin bags. I fill my box within 3 days of it being emptied so have to then go for 2 weeks with blue bags piling up in my house < as i have no front garden> I have no where to store them apart from in my Kitchen. I keep paper and cardboard separate from Tins and jars etc.. I also make sure everything is clean as i wash it out in my washing up water each time i do my dishes so as not to waste water.
But I am begining to wonder why i am bothering as on the front page of the paper a few weeks ago was an Article saying large amounts of our recycled items are being put into Landfill on a weekly bases!...... and then i read this article

Millions of people who recycle their rubbish could find it becomes a futile exercise due to the government's failure to provide enough facilities to prevent it from being dumped in landfill sites, a report from a Whitehall watchdog warns today.

Homeowners and tenants could also have to foot the bill for fines totalling hundreds of millions of pounds because their council has fallen behind in developing recycling schemes. The EU has set a deadline of 2013 to halve dumping in landfill sites; the government faces fines if it misses the target and will pass this on to councils.

The National Audit Office says there is little chance of completing a programme of building incinerators and large-scale recycling schemes by 2013.

The government had tried to fund the programme by raising cash from banks under the private finance initiative, but many of the schemes can no longer get money because of the credit crunch.

Since many involve building large incinerators, they are also running into opposition from residents, resulting in an average delay of more than 19 months in obtaining planning permission. It can take between five and nine years for a new plant to come on stream

[Cotham Marble]

Originally Posted by Blackbrook Eye

When the market price for scrap copper was at its height, the instance of illegally dumped insulation sheathing from copper wiring rose to a point where the clear up opperation cost more than the value of the metal, almost every country lane in this area had a load of the stuff dumped in it, this as per usual was funded by ratepayers. As in my humble oppinion, local authorities who should be taking the lead in implementing the existing legislation on fly tipping and other bye products of recycling seem powerless to prevent these obnoctious secondary effects, no wonder that the public in general have such an indifferent attitude to the whole idea. Keith

It is a common fault by those who support market solutions, that they fail to address the real economy in which their solutions are supposed to work - one of the most frequent failures is lack of acknowledment of the existence of the 'grey economy' where the assumed controls of regulation do not operate.

And while I acknowledge that unforeseen effects of illegal dumping or inefficiencies in the development of new waste collection patterns can have a disinsentivising effect on the public, it seems to me there is no option but to challenge that head on, because otherwise we are stuck in a self fulfilling 'consumerist' prophecy. On the one hand the electorate will not support non market led solutions because this involves higher taxation - and on the other the public is unwilling to deal with the incoveniences and difficulties thrown up by market solutions because 'we've paid our taxes'.

The 'we've paid our taxes' is just another version of consumerist philosophy which says that outside the sale/purchase contract the purchaser has no responsibility for what the seller may do (dump toxic waste, employ sweatshop labour etc) and the only pressure is for the seller to fulfill their supply side of the contract.

The develoment of the 'ethical consumer' may be the way forward, but to be effective those ethics have to extend to individual and untransferable responsibility for what is consumed, how it is used and how it is disposed of. In relation to what 'waste authorities' do it is perhaps more appropriate to think in terms of the 'active citizen' than ethical consumer, although each of us must be one and the same if our destructive relationship with waste is to be ameliorated.

The 'why should I bother if the Council doesn't make it easy for me ?' attitude has to be challenged because of itself that attitude lies at the heart of the problem of uncontrolled consumption - where the individual consumer is 'atomised' and separate from every other other consumer and the collective effect of mass consumption.

This is a not a matter of idealising - it is a simple statement of a fundamental truth about how change either will, or will not happen.

CM

[Kymba]

I just think reading that a lot of the recycling most people do religiously week in week out is ending up in Landfill anyway, makes people think 'Why Bother'

The Goverment and local councils need to get their houses in order to make sure everything we recycle is actually recycled. Otherwise you are going to end up with people not doing any recycling at all, and there is already enough people not bothering without more joining them.

Also how can they justify fining people for not recycling properly when some councils are getting away with putting it straight into landfill sights!