The real ‘recycling’ scandal the BBC missed
The BBC won attention last week for its Freedom of Information Act request to local councils which revealed that up to 15 per cent of all the food and other organic waste they collect from our recycling bins just ends up in landfill or an incinerator, because different councils “apply different rules”.
Rather more interesting than that, however, was the story I reported in 2007, thanks to a brilliant investigation by our local ITV programme
which showed how much of this waste is sent to landfill even it has been turned into compost.
The programme secretly filmed 630 tonnes of food, which had been composted at £50 a tonne, being dumped in a Somerset tip, on which we then had to pay landfill tax at a further £21 a tonne. In Gloucester, where the council boasted on its website that food waste was “spread on the land”, a director of the company involved admitted that none of it ever left the landfill site. A Bristol councillor explained how the 400 tons of food waste they collected each week was trucked 110 miles to Dorset, but what then became of it he did not know.
This was only one of many stories I have written about the barely credible deceits by which we have met our targets under the EU’s Landfill Directive, which was designed, at a cost of billions of pounds, to switch from landfill to recycling.
The simplest trick of all is that waste for recycling needs only to be counted, as far as the EU is concerned, at the point where it is collected from our recycling bins. What happens next, and whether it is actually recycled, landfilled or shipped off abroad to be dumped in Asia or Africa, is of no concern to Brussels.