Clearly, therefore we must stop recycling plastics

A point we’ve been making for a decade now - recycling’s a great idea as long as you’re adding value. If you’re subtracting value by doing so then it’s just yet another method of making us all poorer. Making us poorer not being a known aim of any socio-economic system outside the heads of the Momentum crew.

Thus, if we find that we cannot recycle something because it’s too expensive to recycle that something we should not be trying to recycle. So it is with plastics:

Plastic is becoming too expensive to recycle, councils across Britain will on warn Saturday, raising fears that homeowners' efforts to sort through their waste may be futile.

The warning by the Local Government Association comes as the Telegraph reveals mountains of plastic waste are sitting on an abandoned airfield because the local council cannot afford to send it to be recycled.

The LGA, which represents more than 400 councils across Britain, is demanding that manufacturers contribute more towards the increasing cost of recycling.

Otherwise, they say, local authorities will no longer be able to afford to keep processing it.

Recycling plastic eats money, swallows the wealth of the nation. Therefore we should stop doing it. No, we cannot argue that it saves some precious natural resource - we’re already told we’ve too much of that natural gas around, that we cannot use what we already know is there. To the point that we shouldn’t be drilling for any more. Not that we agree with that last but that is what we’re told by these same people who want us to recycle.

This also does not mean that we should just tip it into the oceans to choke whales. We’ve got it in a nice pile, so we can burn or bury it. We’ve still that waste management problem and the point is simply that there are cheaper ways to deal with it than trying to recycle.

Another way to put this is that if something is worth recycling then someone will pay you for it. If they demand money to haul it away then recycling is not the correct response. Money is being demanded - we should stop this recycling because it’s not adding value, is it?

Do note the overall economic problem, resources are scarce in aggregate. Thus if we waste our wealth on this waste of waste recycling there will be orphan waifs shoeless and subsisting on yesterday’s crust. Burn the plastic, for the kiddies.