Recycling should be a one bin, not seven, operation - anything else is just rubbish

We now have the Prime Minister stating that not everyone will be forced to have seven recycling bins, at least not immediately. At which point some are telling us that this was never going to happen at all. Ah, but yes, it was, as Tom Forth points out. It’s right there in the law.

To be extreme and absurd about it, think on what this means for the country building the smallest new housing in Europe. At 76 m2. If we think of a metre as the space for a bin (that’s the absurd bit) we’re trying to insist that 10% of the rabbit hutch be given over the recycling bins. And as modern planning permission doesn’t allow anyone to have a garden any more (that’s the extreme hyperbole bit) then that seems more than a bit of an imposition.

But as we’ve pointed out before about the seven bins, it’s possible to be entirely reasonable about this. Given that all recycling systems require subsidy they don’t, in fact, save any economic resources, rather they expend them. So why are we doing that? And that’s before we even think about the time required for each household to sort and collect in the right manner.

We should, instead, have the one simple collection method from the one single bin. Which is then processed centrally. Let’s take advantage of economies of scale after all. That which is valuable is extracted, that which is not gets burnt or landfilled.

Do note that we’ve nothing against recycling - one of us lived off scrap metal recycling for years, we can’t be against economic recycling. But we do insist that we should stop doing the recycling that loses money and costs resources. After all, isn’t that the point? To save economic resources by recycling? So let’s do that then.

One bin, one factory, only recycle what makes money. We all know this makes sense so why aren’t we doing it?