Charlie Munger’s advice for Our Andeh

Incentives matter - show us the incentive and we’ll show you the result. So, if you want people to stop doing something stop it being profitable to do that thing. This is all that is required:

‘It smelled like dead people*’: the plan to tackle England’s illegal waste problem

Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown, but doubts remain over authorities’ ability to take on organised crime

Organised crime is flytipping because it is profitable to flytip. So, make it non-profitable to flytip and we’re done.

The Environment Agency received 10,238 reports of suspected waste crime in England in 2025.

That many people don’t do that much unless there’s money to be made by doing it.

Andy Burnham visited the Midland Road waste dump, declaring that the “days of making easy money out of waste are over”.

Quite so, remove the easy money, remove the problem.

“There are really clear signs that this is linked to organised criminality,” says the Environment Agency’s area environment manager, Ben Hocking. Waste crime is profitable for the criminals involved, but costly for the public; approximately 20% of the waste in circulation in England is managed illegally, at a cost to the economy of about £1bn a year.

The clean-up is particularly expensive. Burnham has earmarked three illegal sites where waste needs to be removed: Power Station Road, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent; Aymer Close, in Runnymede, Surrey; and Midland Road. But Hocking estimates the cost to the taxpayer of cleaning up the Midland Road site alone will be upwards of £250,000. The cost of cleaning up the Hoads Wood illegal waste dump in Kent came to £15m.

So, what to do, what to do? The costs of cleaning up the illegal actions are vast. So, let us not provide the incentives for the illegal actions in the first place. Make it easy - and cheap - to dump rubbish into a landfill in the first place. Remove the landfill tax, stop this weird - and damaging - insistence upon trying to recycle everything and just get on with sticking stuff into a hole in the ground. Cheaply, cleanly and without imposing political costs on folk doing so.

As Works in Progress is retailing in fact. Retelling - recycling** - points we have been making here for a couple of decades*** now. Recycle what is profitable to recycle - certain metals for example - and holes in the ground, or nice high temperature furnaces, were made and designed for the rest of it. If you make landfill cheap then you remove the profit and incentive from flytipping. Therefore, to solve flytipping, make landfill cheap. This is not complicated nor complex logic even as it does seem to be beyond our current political class.

Tim Worstall

*No, it didn’t. We humans are very, very, attuned to the smell of dead and rotting humans. Rotting rubbish is not pleasant, certainly, but it’s not the same smell at all. Almost no moderns have ever experienced that smell of rotting humans and anyone who has does not forget it.

** Aha, aha,

*** No, this is good. Our job, here, is to make the weird claims that a decade later everyone realises are, in fact, the obvious path and new common wisdom.