Gog.org.nz

If a heart attack is God’s way of telling you to sort yourself out, the worldwide recession may be His way of dealing with over-consumption, as well as mankind’s futile attempts to combat so-called global warming with carbon emissions trading schemes and our pathetic, unquestioning addiction to recycling.

Now that the world economy is in meltdown, environmentalists should be rejoicing, for there is no longer any need for a carbon tax. We’re all gonna cool down, because we can no longer afford to consume as if there will be no tomorrow.

The Greens would have you believe otherwise, but the truth is that there can only be one sustainable motive behind recycling.

It’s called Profit.

Recycling only works if the waste can be turned into something useful, and at a profit for somebody. But under our newly introduced and savage system of devalued dollars and concentrated common sense, it’s abundantly clear that recycling as we knew it doesn’t work any more. Mountains of paper, plastics and glass are piling up in recycling centres around the country (and around the world) because the Indians and Asians and others who once took it (and hid it on their polluted land, well away from our eyes and our guilty consciences) are also in deep trouble. In the slums of Zimbabwe, the rest of Africa, and much of South America, material recovery from rubbish dumps continues unabated, because the rubbish dump miners there are not subject to the West’s fickle economic values. There, waste has real value.

But today, traditional recyclers cannot make money from our waste (which consists in large part of tin cans, glass bottles and plastic containers that once held milk, fizzless soft drinks and fruit juice) and huge quantities of oil-based bubble wrap and plastic packaging. No one questions why this should be so. No one asks why the fridge or the telly could not have been packaged in sustainable wood-based materials, or why just about every item of food must be cocooned in plastic. Smart alternatives to this sort of environmental vandalism have been available for years.

Now, suddenly, recycling has become as unaffordable as saving the planet from global warming, and we would all be much better off – at least until this crisis is past – by quietly burying all that stuff in an advanced-technology landfill and at least generating some methane for community heating, or using the beer and wine bottles as base-core for Transmission Gully. Matters have now reached the point where recycling companies, bursting at the seams with once-semi-valuable waste that cannot be exported, have admitted they’re on the skids and want New Zealand taxpayers to bail them out of their mess. But State subsidies for recycling companies that charge ratepayers fortunes for collecting recyclables are the very last thing we need, particularly since we’ve already paid the recyclers to remove the evidence.

The concept of recycling in New Zealand, even before global meltdown concentrated a few minds on it, was always severely flawed. Take the case of Napier City Council, where one resident says that every fortnight he is visited by four different recycling wagons. Some of them fail to arrive in time to stop poorly secured recyclables blowing all over his estate. He has found it impossible to get any kind of sensible costings for recycling from council officials.

It’s notoriously difficult to extract real financial figures from councils about recycling costs. What is clear, though, is that ratepayers are forking out huge amounts for recycling contracts owned by companies who now cannot get rid of the stuff. The price for all this worthy (but nigh-on worthless) activity is probably now far more than the rewards due to well-meaning ratepayers.

Last month, Britain’s Daily Telegraph disclosed that councils in England and Wales were dumping more than 200,000 tons of recyclable waste every year – up to 10 per cent of all the glass, paper, plastic and other materials separated out by householders. Thousands of tonnes of recyclables were once shipped thousands of miles to China because of insufficient capacity and demand in Britain. But no longer, because the Chinese don’t want any of it.

In some parts of Britain, residents have to sort their waste into as many as seven containers, including food waste bins – which has helped councils to justify the scrapping of weekly bin collections. Some town halls have admitted using anti-terrorism legislation to snoop on householders who failed to recycle properly, but councils have so far refused to test the Government’s Bin Taxes, under which people can be fined for throwing out too much rubbish.

Now, a leading British waste expert has cast doubt on the wisdom of recycling as we know it.

Peter Jones has suggested that an “urgent” review of UK Labour’s policy on recycling is needed to make sure the collection, transportation and processing of recyclable material is not causing a net increase in greenhouse gases.

Mr Jones, a former director of the waste firm Biffa and now an adviser to environment ministers and the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, also dismissed kerbside recycling collections in many areas as “stupid” because they mixed together different materials, rendering them useless for recycling. He cannot see the sustainable point in shipping vast amounts of recyclable waste to China, when it has no value and could more usefully be burned “three miles down the road” in clean incinerators, to produce local heating and power.

The New Zealand Green Party is dismayed that the National-Act-Maori Government plans to eliminate funding to the ‘Love NZ’ public recycling bins in the 2009/10 Budget. Green Co-Leader Russel Norman called on the Government to honour the original commitment to maintain financial support for the scheme until next year. Yet National appears set on increasing landfill waste taxes at a time when landfill is the only option that makes commercial sense.

From July 2010, its income from the waste levy will be available as an “alternative funding stream”. This is polispeak for taking landfill levy money and using it to support unprofitable recycling companies.

“Cutting support to public recycling is a stupid and short-sighted move that will increase waste to landfill while further undermining our billion dollar ‘100% Pure’ brand,” says Dr Norman.

“Let’s remember the bins were introduced specifically in response to complaints from international tourists about the absence of public recycling facilities in supposedly ‘clean and green’ New Zealand. At a time when the tourist industry is already in trouble, why make things harder?”

Well, Dr Norman, the initial answer is easy: You’ll be looking at a lot fewer complaints from international tourists about rubbish recycling this year, make no mistake, because there will be fewer visitors, thanks in part to you and your party’s opposition to commercial aviation. And any clever tourist will have noticed that our toilets, our water systems and a lot more don’t quite qualify as 100% pure. This unsupportable and unsustainable slogan, in another country, would be subject to a prosecution under the Sale of Goods Act. The fact that we export all our tallow to China proves that sustainability in New Zealand isn’t worth a candle.

When you put out the green bins or the wheelie bins, you probably get a nice and tidy feeling that you are doing something to save the world. More probably, you’re glad to be rid of it. But do you really know what’s happening to your waste? Of course you don’t. And you probably have no idea (or have forgotten) how your parents or grand-parents dealt with worn-out goods. They repaired them at home. They mended socks and panties. They shortened skirts and renovated trousers for youngsters. They didn’t recycle. They re-used.

There’s a grumpy old geezer’s partner in Upper Hutt who is turning her old leather sofa into several heavy biker jackets, and putting the rest into upholstering her old man’s vintage car.

There’s a hugely successful hospice charity shop in the North Island. It attracts valuable pieces from people whose relatives have died, and sometimes the bargains are incredible (if you know what you’re looking for). The people who donate these treasures have no interest at all in recycling. They could have taken all that stuff to the dump. But in their own way, they went for the new mantra:

Re-use it. There are still some people out there who take pride in protecting old values, preserving the worthwhile, and who prefer to save something that may one day prove useful.

The Greens would do far more good by campaigning for a halt to wasteful packaging, rather than trying to put an ambulance at the bottom of the dump.

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