FakeCharity, fake statistics of the day

From Virgin Media:

The value of the materials such as glass and paper that have been sent for recycling is £1.1 billion since 2003[1], the Recycle Now campaign[2] claim. While the demand for recyclable materials has been affected by the economic crisis, Recycle Now said UK markets seemed to be stabilising and more than 95% of recycling collected was being recycled...

According to Recycle Now, 33.8 million tonnes of rubbish has been sent for recycling since 2003 - an amount that would have cost £1.8 billion to send to landfill[3], and would fill the Royal Albert Hall[4] more than 1,000 times...

According to the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), which runs the Recycle Now campaign, the recycling industry supports 100,000 jobs, produces an annual turnover of £17 billion.

Hmm.

1. Let's take the figure of £1.1 billion (from the start of the article) at face value; how does that square with annual turnover of £17 billion (mentioned at the end)? Their figures equate to a turnover of £170,000 per employee, can one person really deal with that much rubbish?

2. 'Recycle Now' are not a 'campaign', they are, as the article states, a sub-quango of the quango Waste Recycling Action Plan.

3. Don't forget that the real commercial cost of sending stuff to landfill would be a fraction of that. The Landfill Tax on 33.8 million tonnes of rubbish at the current rate of £32 per tonne would be £1.1 billion. So the true 'saving' was only £0.7 billion, or £2.33 per UK resident per year. From that we have to deduct the extra costs of separate collections for all the different things that can be recycled (including the extra unpaid minutes that you spend every day cleaning and sorting it), so I wouldn't be surprised if this led to an overall net expense.

4. I like the way that warmenists' basic unit of area is 'the size of Wales' and the basic unit of volume is 'enough to fill the Albert Hall'.