How Does 'Recycling' End Up Here?
By Christopher Booker

The press has rightly been having a field day with the absurdities of the new system introduced by local councils to promote the recycling of rubbish. The Mail on Sunday was particularly excited to discover the "first recycling martyr", a Swansea man who was fined £100 and now has a criminal record because a single piece of junk mail carrying his name was found in a bag meant for cans and bottles. Last week the same paper caught out our "waste minister", Ben Bradshaw, in a far more heinous series of offences, when analysis of his household rubbish showed he had put more than 30 items in the wrong bags. This was just after he had condemned anyone guilty of such acts as "irresponsible".

No one asks, however, the much more interesting question about this crazily complex system: how much of the rubbish collected for recycling actually gets recycled? The reason for the new system is Brussels's landfill directive of 1999, which set targets for the phasing out of landfills across the EU, to replace it with recycling. The Government is remarkably coy with the facts of how we are doing in this respect.

Last week, however, I was supplied by Biffa, our most on-the-ball waste collection company, with figures that show what happens to our 10 million tons a year of packaging waste - and they are startling. At first sight it looks as if the UK is making good progress towards its EC targets. Since 1998, the year before the landfill directive was issued, packaging waste collected for recycling has risen from 2.8 million tons a year to 6 million tons, a rise from 29 to 59 per cent.

But this has only been achieved by a huge increase in the amount of waste we export, mainly to China and other Asian countries. The shipping costs are minimal because the waste provides ballast for the return journeys of the same container ships which bring us the vast quantities of goods we now import from those countries.

The amount of waste we export in this way has risen since 1998 from 115,000 tons to an estimated 2.2 million tons this year, so that half our additional "recycling" is taking place abroad. The conditions in which waste, particularly of plastics and electronic goods, is recycled in China and India are often environmentally horrifying. A significant amount ends up in vast unregulated dumps. To avoid carefully regulated dumping here, we are simply passing the problem on to other countries.

For example, we can tell the EU that our recycling of plastic has increased from 125,000 tons to 488,000 tons - but this is because 305,000 tons of plastic waste, or 63 per cent of the total, is now shipped outside the EU. We have increased our recycling of paper from 1.9 million tons a year to 2.9 million - but the amount of paper we recycle in the UK has dropped by 350,000 tons a year, because our exports have risen from nothing to 50 per cent.

As Phil Conran, Biffa's recycling development manager, explains, it is only because these other countries are willing to take so much of our packaging waste that we appear to be doing so well in meeting those EC targets. But if others follow our example, and countries such as China became less willing to take so much of our waste, we could find ourselves in serious trouble.

Our local authorities already face fines of hundreds of millions of pounds a year, payable to Brussels, for falling short of targets, because in categories other than packaging our record is much worse. (Merseyside alone warns that its fines could soon be £30 million a year.)
Municipal waste, according to Defra, accounts for only 7 per cent of the total, and much of the remaining 93 per cent, including rubble from construction, dredging and quarrying, can only be disposed of by landfill, with the landfill tax rising every year.

Even of household waste, only 22 per cent is recycled. Our composting of food waste is rising significantly, to 2.7 million tons last year, but still, according to Letsrecycle, this leaves 4 million tons a year uncomposted, mainly going to landfill.
The Sunday Telegraph, 5th November 2006