So how much does recycling really, really, cost?
Something we’ve pointed out over the years and here we go again:
Labour councils have imposed “overwhelming” recycling schemes on thousands of households, requiring as many as eight bins.
Families living in Labour-run Cardiff already use up to seven different containers for their waste – with general rubbish, glass recycling, food recycling, paper and cardboard, plastic and cans all stored separately, as well as optional extra bags and bins for nappies and garden waste.
New bags will be distributed specifically for soft plastics, such as packaging, cling film and crisp packets.
Recycling some things is sensible, others not so much. Recycling the 4 tonne rare earth magnet in an ocean going windmill makes excellent sense. Pulling the tiny rare earth magnets out of EarPods very much less. The rare earth content of a metal halide bulb is in the milligrammes range - collecting a million lightbulbs to produce a few kg of something worth perhaps $300 is insane.
The overall aim is, after all, to preserve resources. Which is entirely fine, obviously, but we must be accurate about what is a resource that must be saved. The human effort which goes into this work is, we insist, one such resource that must be added into the calculation. Collecting a 4 tonne magnet, collecting 1 million lightbulbs.
The time people must spend sorting household rubbish for recycling is one of those resources. Our own time is, after all, the one and only truly non-renewable resource we have. Time’s arrow points only the one way. We’ve done this calculation before and as we recall it’s 30 minutes per household per week - (25m hshlds, 0.5/hr, 52 weeks, £12/hr min wage) £8 billion per year. This is a cost of household recycling which is not included in the usual estimates of the costs/value of household recycling. It should be.
We also know what the answer will be if we do include this. Do not do recycling at the level of the household. For such recycling schemes already require subsidy to “work” even without including this cost. We are, by doing things this way, subtracting value from the human experience by wasting precious natural resources. We should stop doing so.
As we also like to point out we can run society in this manner, varied Lanyards gurning at us over their slide rules. Or we can turn to the one calculating machine that can chew through such matters for us, the economy itself and prices. No one will turn up and buy your household rubbish off you therefore recycling household rubbish consumes more resources than it generates. Prices simply do not lie. Even once collected recycling requires further subsidy - it consumes, not saves, resources.
Britain really must get sensible about saving those precious resources - landfill everything.
Tim Worstall