The Daily Mail celebrates their campaign to make us all poorer

The Daily Mail proudly announces that their campaign to get more disposable coffee cups recycled has borne fruit. A new and lovely scheme to recycle more of them has been created. 

Or, as we might more accurately describe it, the Daily Mail's campaign to make us all poorer has succeeded.

Millions of throw away coffee cups will be recycled rather than sent to landfill sites or incinerators under a new service.

Employers will be encouraged to install dedicated bins in workplaces so that cups can be sent to specialist centres.

The Daily Mail’s Curb The Cups campaign highlighted last year how most disposable cups cannot be recycled because they have a plastic coating inside.

As we've noted many a time before, we've nothing against recycling per se, one of us made a living for some years organising profitable such activities. We do, however, object to recycling which makes us poorer. And this does, as we've also pointed out, apply to these coffee cups, recycling them instead of throwing them in a hole in the ground makes us poorer:

The programme does not make a profit. Those who offer up coffee cups for recycling must pay extra to do so. This is on top of the normal waste disposal fees and yes, even on top of the normal landfill tax already charged. The programme is unprofitable and thus makes us all poorer.

And note what the meaning of that is. We are spending more of our scarce resources by recycling than we would by not recycling. We are wasting resources to save them.

Another way to describe this is flat out idiocy but then that's the modern world for you with the mantra about recycling. It's the latest mass delusion to have taken hold of society.

As we'v also pointed out we've a very useful little system to calculate all of this for us:

But the logic also works the other way around. If we can work out the tax we’d have to impose to stop people doing something, and compare that to the actual costs being imposed by their doing it, we can work out whether the benefit is higher than the cost. And we can indeed do that. We know that the tax must be more than £625 million a year to stop this plague of using disposable coffee cups.

I’m told that one medium cup a day for a year amounts to some 5 kg of waste. As the report tells us there are 7 million cups used each day, so that is 35,000 tonnes of waste a year. And we know what the cost of a tonne of landfill waste is. We’ve got a Pigou Tax on it: it’s £83 per tonne these days. The annual cost of chucking those paper cups into landfill is therefore just under £3 million. And there’s not a chance Government is under-taxing us on this, is there?

The environmental cost to society of disposable coffee cups is thus £3 million a year. The benefits to the population are north of £625 million a year.

It is not necessary that we like the answer which the price system delivers to us but it is indeed vital that we understand it. Even when we add up all of the environmental costs of not doing so the recycling of coffee cups makes us poorer. Given that becoming poorer is not a known aim of socio-economic policy therefore we shouldn't recycle coffee cups.

But, you know, the Daily Mail gets its teeth into a misunderstanding of the issue and we all become poorer.