Rob Lyons: Julia Hailes responds on recycling

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

After a lively debate, to say the least, one of the participants shares her experience in the Daily Telegraph blogs:

Battle for recycling

At 8:09 PM, soldierf said...: What a waste, what a waste of time to carefully separate our rubbish for recycling just to see much of it dumped into the same bin to go for landfill or worse still exported to China to be 'Recycled'!!
But can't anyone see that 'post consumer recycling' is the biggest con of our time!
By the time energy has been used to transport, clean and process our rubbish we might as well have made the stuff from scratch!
Paper recycling does not EVEN save trees (and the de-inking process during recycling produces 1 million tonnes of toxic sludge per year in the UK!)
It is much better to REUSE glassware than to send it halfway round the country to be expensively remelted to make what we had anyway! (is that mad or what!)
And there are 7 main kinds of plastics that must not be mixed or contaminated if they are to be successfully recycled.
It is like transporting a truck load of balloons around the country.
How many more recyle lorries do we need?
One for glass?
One for paper?
One for plastic?
And finally one for our general waste?
I beg you to work it out for yourself.
This kind of recycling does not save energy, does not save resources and is just one giant CON!