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A crusade we can't afford to rubbish

Big Brother is coming to get you! And this time he’s looking through your bins… Yes, councils across Britain have put microchips into half a million bins to see whether they can be used to weigh the rubbish we chuck away.

Why? Well across Yorkshire and the Humber, less than one in five tons of rubbish gets recycled. The rest ends up getting buried in landfill sites or going up in flames in an incinerator. In Richmondshire, Kingston upon Hull, Selby and Scarborough, just under one in ten tons of rubbish gets recycled, but in Hambleton and Ryedale it’s more than one in four tons.

The councils who bugged our bins should have told us, but they had the right idea. Why should someone who sorts their paper, plastic and glass pay the same for their rubbish collection as the person who chucks it all in the same bin? Wouldn’t it be fairer if the cost of rubbish collection was taken off our council tax bills and those people who recycled were rewarded with lower bills?

In Germany where some local areas charge around 18p per kilo for waste not recycled, collection of recyclable waste has gone up to more than 65 per cent. In San Francisco, they recycle three quarters of their rubbish because they do the same. Around the globe, ‘pay-as-you-throw’ waste collection means people recycle more than in Britain. In fact, Britain is bottom of the heap, along with Greece and Portugal, across Europe.

Of course we need to be careful how we do it. There must be convenient and efficient recycling collection. We can’t expect the elderly to haul their bottles down to the local tip. It needs to be door-to-door collection. And it needs to be simple to sort – green for glass, pink for paper, purple for plastic. Most importantly, fly-tipping must be made as socially unacceptable as drink-driving and smoking around babies. And anyone tempted to dump waste in their neighbour’s bin, needs to get a massive fine that makes it not worth getting caught. 

This week Sheffield Council started spot checks to stop businesses dumping rubbish at the Blackstock Road, Longley Avenue West, Deepcar, Shiregreen and Beighton recycling centres. That kind of action is exactly what we need councils across the country to be doing. Setting up fair rules and them policing them effectively.

None of this is rocket science, we just have to be ambitious about doing better. We don’t actually pay a very high proportion of council tax for waste services but we still expect the council to cart off whatever we throw out, without thinking where it all ends up .

But we also need to stop manufacturers and supermarkets wrapping organic vegetables in loads of packaging that you can’t recycle. There’s no sense in it. At the moment, supermarkets seem to think that they are giving people what they want, but maybe people want the option of leaving all the packaging in the supermarket and putting their fruit and veg in a paper bag?  

If we carry on as we are, we will need three planets worth of resources to sustain our throw-away culture.  We have to get better at recycling materials– not just newspapers, bottles and cans, but eventually everything.

Residents near Sheffield’s Parkwood Springs are understandably worried about the amount of rubbish going into the landfill site and spoiling the view of the beautiful Peak District. Unfortunately, we’re going to need to keep burning and burying rubbish for a while yet. But we should be doing less and less of it every year and there is no reason why we can’t eventually aim to stop altogether.

This should be our ambition – zero waste.

In the nineteenth century, Britain led the industrial revolution because of our ingenuity and our creativity. Today, our throw-away culture gives us a new set of challenges but should be confident that we can rise to meet them.

If everyone does their bit and we all chill out about microchips in our bins, we can make Britain a zero waste country. We can ‘keep Yorkshire tidy’, we can preserve ‘Herriot country’ and the beauty of the dales. Creating a recycling culture means just a small change in our lifestyles but means make a big difference to the future for our children.

‘A Zero Waste UK’ by Julie Hill, Ben Shaw and Hannah Hislop was published by the Institute for Public Policy Research  and Green Alliance (www.green-alliance.org.uk) in October.