When Waste Costs More Than It Is Worth,

what can we do? as you may know from some of my previous post I have never believed that recycling will pay for itself if you take into consideration the costs of moving it, the previous is even now more true now that world markets have collapsed, over here in Thailand and similar countries where labour and fuel costs are low it is a great way to help the environment and low income families, but in the west even in the good times councils find keeping to their green waste management targets totally unobtainable, that is why the councils have so many secret police snooping around dustbins,

No takers: More waste paper piles up at the Veolia plant in Rainham, Essex

if you think this is paranoid leave your bin out on the wrong day with the wrong rubbish in it and see how long it takes for the fine to appear! taxpayers are facing a multi-million-pound bill to store 100,000 tons of waste paper and cardboard as the British recycling industry plunges into crisis, rubbish carefully sorted by householders is piling up in vast warehouses as the market for waste paper collapses, and experts have warned that the mountain of garbage could double in the next three months, to put this in perspective, the paper mountain could have already cost taxpayers about £2million – and that figure could double in the next three months as the pile grows from 100,000 to 200,000 tons at a rate of 8,300 tons a week,

in case you did not know Councils are fined £32 per ton if they send materials that could be recycled to landfill sites, this forced councils to boost recycling efforts to meet their targets, in turn, local authorities imposed strict rules on householders already struggling to keep waste to a minimum in the period between fortnightly bin collections, in some areas of the country, residents face fines of up to £200 if they ‘contaminate’ recycling containers with the wrong type of rubbish,

but there is some good news, Gordon Brown still uses plastic carrier bags for his weekly supermarket shop despite pledging to eliminate them, Greg Barker, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, said: ‘It appears that all the noise Gordon Brown was making last year was just for short-term headlines, ‘It’s a shame that he doesn’t do more to make it easier for everybody to use fewer plastic bags and waste less.’ so that is all right then.