What a Waste
January 8, 2009 by Ken
Filed under Environ-mental
In my local paper the Shropshire Star, I have been having a debate with a member of the Green Party sparked by a letter commenting on Eric Pickles the Tory spokesman on the environment; who told radio listeners recently that the whole waste collection policy is a fiasco with economic and revenue concerns rather than an environmental issue.
In reality the comments from Mr Pickles are nothing more than political posturing because the any newly elected Conservative government will be tied by the same EU shackles as any other government of this country.
The Environment and therefore waste disposal is an EU competence and unless the Conservatives are going to take back control of the environment from the EU there is nothing they will do that Labour will not.
I do not think Mr Cameron is about to make any sort of stand on this subject, in fact he seems very keen to enhance the conservatives image with the environmentalists by outwardly supporting EU environmental policies. Not that he suggests they are EU environmental policies, they have in his mind simply transmogrified into Conservative policies that miraculously sprang out of thin air, they just happen to coincide with EU policies. So any spurious argument with Labour about waste disposal is nothing more than hot air designed to imply that the Conservatives will do things differently, which they will not because they will not be allowed to.
Putting aide the fact that I neither subscribe to the EU or the arguments of the anthropogenic global warming theorists but nevertheless addressing the problems we have seen reported in the press recently about the growing mountains of recovered waste material that are not actually being recycled and therefore have to be stored at great expense to the taxpayer.
It seems to me that a basic switch has taken place; I will try to explain, the reason we are lumbered with the present recycling schemes is because the emissions from landfill sites are said to be affecting global warming whether they are in fact doing so is not the purpose of this, so I will accept the basic premise that they are.
Even if they are not, it is clear that we are faced with a growing waste disposal problem because there is far too much waste being produced, of course the simplest measure to combat a great deal of waste would be to reduce the amount we are being forced to deal with in the first place, by forcing manufactures to limit the amount of waste they include with their goods. Just about everything we buy nowadays is pre-packed, this of course suits the producer and the big sales outlets because it both presents the product in an enticing manner to assist sales and enables a reduction of staffing levels at the point of sale thus increasing profits, and of course much packaging is defined by other EU Legislation.
But back to the switch; what has happened is in order to address the landfill emissions the EU has decided to increase recycling and has therefore placed targets on recycling and in order to force governments meet those targets the EU have introduced fines for those countries not meeting the targets. So instead of being concerned about landfill emissions we suddenly become concerned about meeting targets for recycling, the switch has been accomplished, now instead of looking at other measures that might reduce landfill emissions we are led to believe that if we could only meet recycling targets the landfill emission will look after themselves.
But something else has happened, because the recycling market was already meeting the demands for recyclable goods, instead of counting waste material as recycled when it was in fact recycled the councils decided to count is as recycled at the point of collection. So they have set in train a system that produces materials for which there is no solid market, a system that is driven not by demand, but instead by the amount of waste collected.
Any recycling system is very dependant on markets and the price the material can command, of course recycling many materials only delays the trip to the eventual landfill or alternative disposal. It is said that all newspapers produced in the UK are now made using recycled material, what is not said is that the process of de-inking produces one million tonnes of toxic sludge per year in the UK which is sent to landfill! Also according to press reports confirmed by telephone with one company none of Britain’s 80 paper mills is now accepting new stock this means that it is ether being exported to Indonesia or China at a knock down price or worse stockpiled.
So instead of finding ourselves in a beneficial recycling loop we are producing a product for which there is no market and without a market the only way the system can operate is through subsidies. So we find ourselves concentrating all our efforts in order to meet targets otherwise we face fines, on top of which we charge companies a landfill tax or we practically give the stuff away to be transported 8,000 miles to China without any knowledge of the environmental or social costs. Where the Chinese either process it and send it back to us or burn it to produce electricity instead of burning coal.
Meanwhile we destroy our landscape to build wind farms in order not to produce enough electricity for our needs.
Talk to a green party member and they will deny there is a problem with recycling or wind farms, or for that matter renaming rubbish recycled material and transporting it 8000 miles, just so that we do not get fined by the EU for not meeting their targets on a secondary policy introduced to solve the problem of landfill emissions. Because they like the EU are blinded by their own ideological position wedded to wind and recycling, instead of looking at other alternatives. For instance we have to much rubbish, we are fast running out of enough electricity production capacity to meet our demands so why do we not use our rubbish to produce our electricity. Instead the EU designates (EfW) plants a key component of any renewable energy portfolio as waste-treatment instead of energy-generation plants.
