Household Recycling is State-Endorsed Slavery

Breitbart's London ^ | July 5, 2014 | James Delingpole

[2ndDivisionVet]

Recycling is authoritarian, demeaning and an unutterable waste of time, energy and money. No surprise, then, that the European Union is planning to force its vassal states to do much, much more of it.

Last week, the European Commission proposed its most draconian waste disposal legislation yet: a plan requiring 70 per cent of all municipal waste and 80 per cent of packaging waste to be recycled by 2030; a total ban of the landfill of recyclable waste by 2025, aiming "to virtually eliminate landfill" by 2030.

As even the Guardian quietly concedes, this is an impossible ambition:

The new targets will be difficult for the UK to meet, as recycling rates have recently stagnated after a period of rapid growth in the past decade. According to figures released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in November, 43.2% of waste in England was recycled in 2012-13. That figure was just 12% in 2001 but the UK is still well behind Austria and Germany, which recycle 63% and 62% of their waste respectively.

But that won't, of course, stop the green activists who have hijacked our councils (in accordance with Local Agenda 21) using it as an excuse to inflict further hairshirt misery on householders. On average, councils in Britain expect residents to sort their waste into four separate containers; but with some local authorities it's as many as seven boxes or multi-coloured bags. The record is held by Newcastle-under-Lyme which has nine different bins, bags and boxes.

This is the most extraordinary imposition on people's time. Research from Seattle suggests that it takes a typical household about 45 minutes per week to recycle its rubbish. In the US that works out at ninety million hours expended every week dividing green glass from brown glass from cardboard...

[CatherineofAragon]

"I don't do it, do you?"

Nope. Everything goes straight down the road to the dump. I hope the earth can survive my environmental sins. /S

[grania]

KarlInOhio:

Here's a question from grania in Ohio. I'm told that before recycling cans, one is supposed to rinse them out. That means all the ingredients in people's food is getting into the sewer system and out to Lake Erie.

How does that help the environment?

[ErnBatavia]

Pingie....

[catnipman]

“I discourage teaching our Americans to sort trash”

Our recycling is picked up every other week as part of our normal weekly trash service, and the recycling is single stream, so there is no sorting. The only sort is trash in one can and recyclables in the other. That doesn’t seem overly difficult or intellectually taxing, does it?

[ElkGroveDan]

‘zackly.

Thanks for catching this.

[ElkGroveDan]

Flashback to a great article from a few years ago: Three Myths about Trash

[KarlInOhio]

Here's a question from grania in Ohio. I'm told that before recycling cans, one is supposed to rinse them out. That means all the ingredients in people's food is getting into the sewer system and out to Lake Erie.

1. I generally don't rinse them out. I don't know if the rinsing is supposed to make the recycling easier or if it is just supposed to keep from attracting rats to the recycling bins and plants.

2. Water going into the sanitary sewer system is processed the same way all sewage is. A little rinsed out corn that was left in the can is far less nasty than after I've "processed" it.