Robo-bins say "Bottles mean prizes!"

The unfortunate aftermath of the latest SSY party

The ConDem coalition government has shown its true shade of green with new proposals to reward households who produce more recycling waste.  The plans, announced last week by Communities Secretary, Conservative Eric Pickles (whose name just seems to capture his essence), are ostensibly designed to reduce waste going into landfill sites around the country.  In reality they illustrate how the government’s commitment to market idealism trumps any supposed commitments to the environment made during the election campaign or before.

Microchips are being fitted to wheelie bins and household waste measured on collection, in a pilot scheme being rolled out to 60, 000 households in the Conservative-controlled borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in the southeast of England.  The scheme rewards households for producing more recyclable waste, with a loyalty-card like system whereby residents collect points for their recycled rubbish, which are then exchanged for shopping and restaurant vouchers for up to the value of £130.  While there are not yet plans to create a national scheme, Pickles’ endorsement could mean other English local authorities follow suit in the near future.

The previous New Labour administration had toyed with the idea of microchips in bins before, tabling both incentive schemes like this one and the contrasting approach of introducing tax-like penalties for households sending too much waste to landfill.  The latter idea generated a fearful response from the tabloids, with the Daily Mail warning of “Spy chips hidden in 2.5 million dustbins” and “council snoopers [planning] pay-as-you-throw tax” in March this year.

However both the carrot of the incentive scheme and the stick of the waste tax are misplaced policies that fail to tackle the real causes of the excessive quantities of rubbish our society produces.  As philosopher and environmentalist James Garvey argued in the Guardian last week, the point should be to reduce waste overall, not just change the bins people use to dispose of it.  The old environmental adage, “reduce, reuse, recycle” was in that order for a good reason.  Recycling of recyclable materials should be the last resort, with far greater emphasis on reducing the amount of waste produced in the first place.  This is because while recycling is certainly better, and more energy efficient, than sending waste to landfill and creating new products and packaging from scratch using raw inputs (like oil for plastics, trees for paper and card or metal ores for tin cans), it is still an energy-intensive and environmentally destructive process, especially as recycling too has been left to the fate of the market.

John Vidal reported in 2004 that over one third of recycling waste collected in the UK was being sent 8,000 miles around the world for processing in China, without any consideration for the environmental and social consequences – especially as China is quickly becoming one of the most polluted countries in the world, with very little in the way of legal protection for the environment or exploited workers.  The Environment Agency admits that the practice of exporting recycling waste has continued to expand, suggesting on their website that, “If you work for a local authority or company that is involved in waste management, an increasing amount of the wastes you collect and process for recycling and re-use will ultimately be exported.”  They report that the volume of waste exported doubled from seven million tonnes in 2002 to 14 million tonnes last year.

Sometimes SSY members try to sneak back after their 27th birthday

However even if recycling were rationally planned and performed locally to good environmental standards, it would still be far less efficient than producing less stuff in the first place. The problem with both the bin tax and the incentive scheme is they do little or nothing to reduce the amount of rubbish produced.  The Tories’ incentive scheme could even potentially increase the amount of waste generated.  As Garvey describes it:

“The point of recycling has to do with understanding the importance of reducing waste in a finite world. It costs energy and resources to make a plastic bottle, fill it with water, package it and ship it to your local shop. We currently get almost all of that energy by burning fossil fuels and doing damage to our climate. The resources which go into the bottle’s production, distribution and disposal might have been used in other, better ways. Once empty, the bottle might take up space in a landfill or end up in the ocean. If you understand the value of reducing waste in a finite world – if you want to avoid a hand in wasting energy, causing climate change, squandering resources, poisoning oceans – you might think twice about buying a bottle of water. If you recycle because you earn reward points for doing so, you might just buy a lot of plastic bottles.”

This also points to the second problem with market-based “solutions” to environmental problems, that of inequality.  The pay-as-you-throw tax proposal would have affected all households equally, regardless of income or the availability of opportunities for avoiding excessive packaging and wasteful consumption.  Only those with access to gardens or allotments, as well as spare time, are in a position to compost their food wastes, for example.  Similarly the incentive scheme encourages wasteful consumerism – especially rewarding those who can afford to consume the most – while celebrating that it might persuade a few more to use the right kinds of bins for the right kind of rubbish.

A complete rethink of priorities is necessary to really challenge the way waste is produced and dealt with, rather than simply attempting to tinker with people’s behaviour to get a few more items in recycling bins and a few less in the ground or floating in the sea.  Supermarkets, the food industry and other commercial interests need to be challenged and prevented from covering everything in maddeningly excessive packaging.  People should be given the opportunity and be encouraged to consume less stuff and live less wastefully, not just cajoled into using recycling bins, whether by carrot or stick.  The logic of free market capitalism has been the cause of excessive waste and environmental destruction. Are we really expected to believe that a market-based response can do anything to reverse that?