Paying for landfill
There is a good case for making landfill disposal free, or even paying people to use it. Because we charge for it, people fly-tip over the countryside. It costs a great deal of money to clear this. We are not short of UK landfill sites. There are disused coal mines, gravel pits, etc.
The current system creates the very problem it's meant to solve. Landfill tax was designed to discourage waste and encourage recycling. Instead, for a meaningful minority of waste, such as old sofas, building rubble, garden waste and white goods, it simply discourages legal disposal. The waste doesn't vanish; it turns up in lay-bys, hedgerows and river banks instead. A policy that displaces the problem rather than solving it cannot be described as a success story.
Fly-tipping is enormously expensive to the public purse. Local councils spend tens of millions of pounds a year clearing illegally dumped waste, on top of the enforcement costs of trying, and mostly failing, to catch offenders. That is money spent achieving a worse outcome than doing nothing at all. If free disposal reduced fly-tipping significantly, the savings in clean-up and enforcement could easily outweigh the lost tax revenue.
Landfill capacity is not actually scarce. Britain has a large stock of derelict industrial land crying out for productive after-use. This includes disused coal mines, worked-out gravel pits and quarries. Filling these with inert or general waste is often the cheapest and quickest way to restore them to usable land, rather than leaving them as unproductive scars on the landscape. The scarcity that justifies a high landfill tax in some countries does not apply here.
Fly-tipped waste does more environmental damage than landfilled waste. Waste in an engineered, regulated landfill is contained, monitored, and often generates methane that can be captured for energy. Waste dumped in a country lane or a stream leaches directly into soil and watercourses, harms wildlife, and often has to be removed and landfilled anyway, at greater expense and with the damage already done. If the environmental objective is what matters, channelling waste into landfill sites is the environmentally superior outcome compared to the fly-tipping the charge incentivises.
Paying people to dispose of waste properly could be self-financing. If a modest payment per load, for garden waste, or bulky items and construction debris, induced people to use legal tips instead of dumping in a field, the state would save on clean-up costs, avoid prosecuting rarely found offenders, and could plausibly come out ahead financially, quite apart from the amenity value of a countryside that isn't littered with mattresses and fridges.
It removes a temptation that criminalises otherwise law-abiding people. Most fly-tippers aren't hardened criminals; they are people who did a house clearance or a garden tidy-up and did not want to pay £40 to get rid of a wardrobe. A charge that turns ordinary householders into casual lawbreakers is bad policy on its own terms, regardless of the environmental case.
Recycling incentives can be preserved separately. None of this requires abandoning the idea of steering waste toward reuse and recycling; that can be handled through separate collection, kerbside schemes, and targeted incentives, without holding the entire waste stream hostage to a tax that mainly succeeds in pushing sofas into ditches.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but the best policy might be to pay people to dispose of waste tidily and efficiently, rather than charging them to do so.
Madsen Pirie