As we’ve noted over the years, recycling that adds value is worth doing, recycling that requires subsidy possibly isn’t. But over and above that there’s the method of recycling to be used:

Households could need as many as seven bins to comply with new national waste-collection plans being drawn up by the Government.

The average new build in the UK currently has some 76 square metres of space. If each bin has a footprint of 1 m2 then we’re using 10% of the hovels we allow the proles merely to store the recycling until the council can be bothered to come around and collect it. If half that size then it’s still 5% - an excessive amount even then.

Or, we can think of this the other way. A useful estimate of the time it takes a household to sort and prepare materials for recycling is 30 minutes per week. With roughly 30 million households that’s 15 million hours a week of labour required. Or, the full time labour of 400,000 people at the usual 37.5 hour work week.

At which point why not muse on the benefits of economies of scale and mass production? If we were to change our system so that instead of praying to Gaia separately, each in our kitchens, we were to bundle everything off in the one bag to be sorted automatically in large factories? Such do exist, after all, it is merely a choice that is being made here about the method to be used in recycling.

Note what this would mean. If said factories required the labour of fewer than 400,000 people for the country as a whole then that would be the more efficient use of human labour. And isn’t it continually said that labour productivity flatlining is one of the major problems that afflicts us?

Or, as this also works out, why don’t we make ourselves richer by abandoning this idea of household recycling and moving to factory recycling? Just as we made ourselves richer by moving to industrial farming, industrial spinning and weaving, industrial production of pretty much everything else in fact.

Modernity, it has something of a ring to it.