UK – distinguishing between recycling and religion

Here is a reflection from yesterday‘‘s Daily Telegraph by Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute. You may not agree with al the sentiments, but it makes a useful contribution to the debate. Of course, one of the arguments for recycling more is that it closes the mental loop and reminds consumers of their consumption…..



Personal view: It‘‘s just rubbish to put recycling on the level of a religion



A four-year study by the Environment Agency has confirmed what many of us, with our back-of-the-envelope calculations, had already worked out: that disposable nappies are no worse for the environment than washable ones. It might seem intuitively obvious that washables are best. You just wash and re-use them, instead of throwing them into a plastic bag and letting them mount up at landfill sites, leaking methane into the air and other unmentionables into the soil.



But when the agency looked at the whole life-cycle of washables and disposables, it found “little or no difference” in the environmental impact. After all, washing nappies requires water. You need gas or electricity to boil it. You use bleach and detergent, which goes down the drain and into our waterways.



Disposable nappies are certainly bulky to transport but the cotton in washable ones is flown here over long distances from China, Pakistan, or the United States. If you send washable nappies to the laundry, you have to think about the pollution, congestion, accidents and noise caused by the laundry van. Add it all up, and disposables come out no worse. Which at least proves something else we had long suspected – that the armies of Real Nappy Officers appointed across the country in Gordon Brown‘‘s public jobs binge are themselves disposable. A lot of the modern recycling religion turns out to be pure garbage.



When you‘‘ve finished with a polystyrene cup and are about to pitch it into the bin, you probably feel faintly sinful, and embarrassed that you didn‘‘t use one of those virtuous ceramic mugs. Well, don‘‘t be. It takes a lot more energy to make that ceramic mug; and then each washing uses more energy, plus water and detergent. The Canadian chemist Martin Hocking calculated that you would have to use the mug 1,000 times before the energy consumed per use fell below that of the foam cup. And of course if you break it before then, it‘‘s no contest. And you are much less likely to pick up nasty bacteria from a foam cup.



Aluminium drink cans, though, certainly are worth recycling. Re-working the metal uses just a fraction of the huge amount of energy that is required to process bauxite into aluminium, and to mine it in the first place. But sometimes the way we do that recycling is so wasteful it is almost laughable. My local authority has a recycling plan, so now we all have three plastic bins, which themselves are no great beautification of the environment.



But the recycling commandments are complicated and people often put the wrong things in each one. So when the dustcart comes round, the driver sits there (revving the engine, pumping out diesel fumes and holding up the traffic), while another guy sorts out our rubbish into the various compartments. Human time is a more precious resource than old bottles; but here we are, just wasting it. Families in Mexico City throw out far more rubbish than families in the United States. That is because more of their food is unprocessed: it does not keep, and much of it is unusable.



The outer leaves of American supermarket cabbage, the excess fat on the meat, or the skins of the oranges used for juicing, all go for animal feed. In Mexico such things just rot in the rubbish: more material needs to be transported into people‘‘s homes and then out again to the rubbish dumps. The plastic packaging of American food also ends up in landfill but it is thin, cheap<