"Shops should pay for recycling"

*sigh*

From The Metro, more crap from the bansturbators:

Supermarkets are using excessive food packaging and should* contribute towards the cost of dealing with it, a new report says. The study by the Local Government Association (LGA) found people's efforts to recycle rubbish were being undermined by the stores they shop in... As well as making recycling easier and more affordable this would also ease the burden of landfill tax on local government, it says. Landfill tax costs councils £32 for every tonne of rubbish they throw away - a figure that will rise to £48 a tonne by 2010 - meaning that by 2011 an estimated £1.8 billion will have been spent on it since 2008.

The only halfway sensible comment is this, at the end:

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said the survey failed to acknowledge the key role packaging plays in preserving food and thereby reducing waste. Its head of environment Bob Gordon said: "It's a nonsense to suggest that retailers swathe their goods in masses of unnecessary packaging. This would simply be a pointless cost. Packaging reduces waste by protecting and preserving products."

*/sigh*

Meanwhile, on Planet Wadsworth, we leave the EU and the first thing we do is scrap Landfill Tax (being an insane tax that bears no relation to anything, point 4 here) and VAT (the Worst Tax Of All).

Sure, refuse collection has a cost (which appears to be about £100 per household per year), but it is simpler to levy this on new goods than to charge people for refuse collection (because of fly-tipping problem and so on). A flat one or two per cent charge on new goods (including food, a lot of which goes in the dustbin) would cover refuse collection costs nicely, or we could be a bit more sophisticated and have graded rates depending on how expensive it is to dispose of stuff safely (so there'd be a much higher rate on car batteries and a lower rate on paper, for example, for detailed workings see the second part of this).

* A good rule of thumb is that anybody using the s-word to support an argument is usually in the wrong.