Its a great idea, recycling. Anyone can see how many people there are, and its easy to imagine how much rubbish we produce. It has to be a good idea to recycle as much of it as we can.
And then of course there is the attitude of the local councils. These are the people who are responsible for removing our waste and disposing of it, and in the case of our recycled waste, of dealing with it in an appropriate manner.
There has been a sudden, although not entirely unexpected drive, toward rubbish collections every two weeks, rather than the customary, and fairly sensible weekly pickup. However, this two weeks is only for our household rubbish; recycled rubbish will still be collected once a week.
So far so good. Nothing Iv said so far is a problem. However, there are some other things to consider: Firstly there will soon be a charge per weight, of un-recycled waste. In some ways this could even be a good thing, since it might prompt some people into recycling more. But there’s more to this than meets the eye.
For a start the council where I live will only recycle certain things. For example, they wont take margarine or yogurt containers, both of which can be recycled, it just costs a bit more. The same goes for bottle tops and lids – these can all be recycled, but we are told not to put them in with the other plastic recycling. For that matter we are not meant to recycle plastic food containers either, and with just those items Iv mentioned so far that means we are not supposed to recycle about 80% of the plastic we use.
The list is a whole lot longer, but I’m not repeating it all here. The point I’m trying to make is that the council will soon be wanting to charge us for un-recycled waste, but they are not providing us the opportunity to recycle everything. In other words this is going to be just another stealth tax, that we are going to have to pay on top of the council tax we already pay, which is supposed to cover our waste removal.
Recycling is a great idea, but now that the councils have realised they can use it to screw us for a few more pennies the whole thing has collapsed. They are not interested in recycling for its own sake, they are interested in charging us for not recycling, while at the same time, not spending any money to make the system work.
All this helping to save the planet is great. Lots of money to be made from it.
