Dispatches -Recycling Programme

[charliecat]

Did you watch it?
On paper, fantastic recycling unit recycling everything that came through its doors.
In practice recycled the stuff that came in sorted already if there was a buyer for it.
If not it went to landfill, other stuff that needed to be sorted wasnt and was shredded and sent to landfill and they were even taking daily lorryloads full of household rubbish illegally to landfill.
:(

Much local government recycling is not well thought through. It's based upon the original tory landfill tax which confused accountancy for rational economics. It's then implemented by arts graduates in councils who see "numbers" as some sort of malign spirit.
Thus when they see that there is no economic return from recycling they thing the other malign spirit "money" is lying to them.
Money simply reflects the truth that a large % of waste is not viable to recycle. It often consumes more energy and produces more nasty waste to recylce than to construct from new.
Look at what they do to "recycled" paper.

Anyone who has doen even basic economics would know that as councils increased the cost of official methods of waste disposal, illegal methods would become more common.
But "economics" are bad right wing neo-fascist spirits, and so councils ignore them.

Recall the last "scandal" when it turned out that in many places there was a surplus of recycled grass so it was turned into sand ?

You can close the loop, but Gruaniad level tokenism and "altering perceptions", isn't going to be useful.
To do it properly you have to involve those nasty people who can count and worse still engineers. Oh dear can you imagine it ? All those sad geeks, almost none of whom believe in homeopathy ? In a council meeting ?, they'd rather invite the BNP.

You need to go back to primary production. It may have sounded cool to force manufacturers to out a code for the type of plastic used, but there is no machine that can read and sort rubbish based upon it. Hands up those who even know what PVC stands for ?

You can do it by forcing manufacturers to use one of a fixed set of containers. Shape is a lot easier to sort by, for both machines and people.

But to make it viable, what you really need is to leave the container intact. That means building them so they can last mulitple cycles.

This will reduce glass and plastic waste a lot.

This will be horribly expensive to set up, and Blair's government is so in thrall to lobby groups, it simply can't make this sort of decision. The Tories are less in thrall simply because most lobbyists don't bother with them as much.

Food waste is a big thing as well, and harder to fix. A large % is vegetables because people feel they should eat more, but don't actually get round to it.

Ready meals are bad, typically have shorter lives in homes, and are heavily wrapped. Few are nutritionally balanced. Tax them hard.

That won't happen either. Some lobby will say "lost jobs" and the government will retreat.

Ultimately what we're going to see is simply using waste collection as a revenue generator for councils. Same as parking. Anyone really think that it could end any other way ?

great post DC

When I was growing up in the 70's, you could return empty pop bottles for 2p. We used to make a small fortune on fete day.

We made a fortune handing them in, then climbing over the yard wall at the back of the shop and 'recycling' them a few more times

Yeah, I did this as well.
In some parts of the USA homeless people make their cash from this sort of free market recycling.

Milk is the only working example of the notion of standardised containers, and is one of the few genuinely viable recycling programmes.

I did some work on recycling of electronic goods a few years back. They contain notable amounts of tin & lead which are both bad things to let loose but also valuable, indeed lead is the most efficiently recycled material in industrial processes.
Lessons cound (nearly) be taken from the computer industry where machines are modular. You don't usually need to buy a new screen when you upgrade the main processor, and in most models, the processor itself is in an upgradeable socket.We pushed this stuff quite hard, but with only marginal effect.
The power supplies on consumer goods typically are large lumps of metal, often with a lot of copper.
In many units, like TVs, if it dies, most people buy new ones. PSUs also are one of the most common things to fail, making the idea of separate boxes as in most laptop PCs more economically and environmentally sound.
However, the laws, such as those in Germany, are actually protectionism for local manufacturers, and so if you did build stuff that way, the maker would be heavily financially penalised.
Lobbies are the problem with all such laws. In Japan the car makers love the fact that it has the highest emission control laws in the world. Stops foreign firms selling cars in Japan, and forces people to buy new cards in preference to 2nd hand.
Thr numbers I did at the time pointed to the fact that actually the best thing you could do was stop buying unreliable goods. Within most types of goods there is a spread of at least a factor of 2 between average and the best ,and greater than 5 between worst and best in terms of mean time between failure.
This can be applied cheaply and easily to white goods, PCs etc. Put "life expectancy" labels on all goods according to standardised tests.
Such goods are typically better value in the long run, and with considerably less impact upon the environment.

I'm 100% with you on good quality goods. Of course, you need to have cash on hand, not everyone does.
The evil spirtis of right wing economics whisper to me that there's a relationship between interest rates paid by consumers and longevity of goods.

It wouldn't be too hard to have lifetime cost of goods as aprt of the information required to be on fridges, cookers etc. Include interest rates.
There is a trade off between capital cost and running cost. A more expensive device may or may not use less energy and may last longer.
Total lifetime cost isn't quite the same as environmental impact but is a good approximation.

Deposits on goods are the most easily hijacked by vested interests. Supermarkets for instance would gain very much more power in this game. Also mobile farmers markets would be hit quite hard.

Most people seem happy to recycle glass, paper even without direct financial incentives.
But it does still beg the question of whether they make sense in environmental terms.
Waste separated for recycling is much more bulky meaning lots more heavy dirty lorries cruising in wasteful first gear along our streets to pick it up.
Also it's hard even for people who really care about this stuff to separate well. Steel is easy because magnests can suck it out, sadly there is no great shortage of iron, it uses much less energy in it's extraction than aluminium and isn't a dangerous polluter.
Plastics are almost stupidly fiddly to sort with dozens of different types, and very bulky for a given weight.
I get the impression that the glass recyclers have long given up the battle of getting people to sort glass well, and it doesn't take many brown bottles in the clear bin to ruit it's use as clear glass. Also it seems that we're already recycling more than the inudstry can use.
Paper requires a lot of bleaching before it can be reused, and the waste from that is bad.
Also a large and rising % of paper comes from farmed timber, so the benefit of recycling is diminished. It may even be the case that growing wood by sucking carbon ut of the air, using it as paper, then burying it for a few hundred years is a good way of attacking CO2 based climate change.