Test your recycling knowledge.

OTOH upped the ante in the comments here:

Pre-sorting your waste is no biggie... to more-or-less try to get it right for adults, but my council puts bossy warning stickers on the bin if you get it wrong. My children try. e.g. Pringles seem cardboard to them, but it has silver foil on the inside and is unrecyclable. For many things I am supposed to peel off the thin plastic film on the top to throw away, but recycle the plastic tray. Other things say 'refer to the recycling policy in your area.'

So either the recycling policy is not very strict, which makes the 'product' unusable other than for burning so this is all just virtue signalling, or the council policy is very strict, which certainly makes the obligation a "biggie"

Test your knowledge

Recycling cardboard - should you remove all the sticky tape?

Cooking oil - do you pour your cooking oil into a plastic bottle and place it in your food caddy, or absorb it in newspaper and dispose of in your caddy?

Wrapping paper - recyclable?

Unused tissues - recyclable?

Black plastic plant pot - recyclable?

There are 50 types of plastic, but only 6 are labelled. Which of those labelled 1-6 can be recycled?

Can triggers can be left on cleaning product bottles and pumps on soap bottles?

Knowing full well that I'll get most of these wrong, I will venture:
- Yes
- Neither. Take the bottle of oil to the recycling centre and dispose of there.
- Yes
- Yes
- I take them back to the garden centre if I can, if not I chuck them in the plastic.
(I've a nasty feeling they're not recyclable, going by the question).
- Not the foggiest
- I remove the metal bits and put them in the metal.

Refundable bottle deposits 2

Re last weeks Fun Online Poll, on the subject of refundable bottle deposits.

The Surfers Against Sewage website that promotes this, says the following:
The system would be largely self-funded through the small proportion of unclaimed deposits.

Evidence from existing systems shows that this is not entirely true, not too far off either, but so what - what's the point of a system that has to be used less than optimally to be funded?


Norway has had refundable bottle deposits for a long time, the reverse vending machines have been in shops since the 70s, and the current legislation/system is structured in quite a nifty way. From the outset, all drink bottles and cans are subject to a tax per bottle. After all, the most efficient and sensible way to pay for refuse treatment is for it to be pre-paid. There's no compulsion to join the deposit-refund scheme, and if producers find it's not worthwile, they don't. They can however join the scheme, through a member-owned organisation that handles the return and refund bit. The tax per bottle is then reduced in stages, until it's reduced to zero if 95% of more of the bottles are returned and handled.

The economics of this can be read from the 2015 annual reports of Infinitum, the cleverly named company reponsible for the scheme (in Norwegian).
Annual operating/admin costs before deposit refunds: 438 million NOK.
Net deposit income after refunds: 206 million NOK
Sale of materials: 124 million NOK
Net costs, of which most are paid by producers, and ultimately passed onto consumers, are around 108 million NOK.
This works out at around 1p per bottle/can that is run through the system, compared to the alternative tax which is slightly more than 30p.

For this you get the benefit of virtually no bottles and cans lying around or drifting off the coasts, and an easy source of pocket money for the kids. Both producers and consumers are left with the choice of partaking in the scheme / returning the containers or not, but enough people do so, and between 80-90% of bottles and cans are returned.

You can basically apply this principle to most products and materials, and the degree of intervention isn't very high except for the tax - importers/producers work out the particulars amongst themselves as long as the end-result is satisfactory.

Fun Online Polls: Recycling & NHS queue jumping

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

It would be a good idea to charge refundable deposits on...

Glass drinks bottles - 13 votes
All glass jars - 12 votes
Plastic drinks bottles - 9 votes
Aluminium cans - 10 votes
Other, please specify - 0 votes
None of the above 7 votes

Total voters - 22

The low turnout might be because I messed up the widget, or maybe the topic is not that interesting.

That's not an overwhelming majority in favour of deposits. IMHO there are three main reasons for deposits:

a) To encourage recycling of valuable materials
b) To discourage littering, knock-on pollution
c) To discourage use of disposable materials, the production of which harms the environment in the first place.

In which case, the results are the wrong way round.
- Plastic drinks bottles got the lowest number of votes. They are a waste of raw materials but those materials aren't worth much. The point is that producing them causes pollution and they end up shredded in the oceans, so not a good thing.
- Aluminium cans got the second lowest number of votes, even though aluminium is the most valuable raw material and drinks cans are very likely to end up as litter.
- Glass got the most votes, even though it is not a particularly valuable raw material and is quite heavy to take back to the shop. Food jars are unlikely to end up as litter, and if they do they are completely inert so don't cause any knock-on pollution (although splinters of drinks bottles can cause injury or puncture tyres, I suppose).

All in all, I'm not sure what to make of it.
----------------------------------------------
There was some wailing in The Guardian recently about people paying £145 to see a GP privately. Their arguments against are that this "will mean NHS patients without money will wait even longer for care" and it will lead to a "two-tier NHS".

Both those arguments are nonsense, the doctors are operating privately, so good luck to them. The real argument against is that these GPs are rent-seeking, they are selling earlier access to taxpayer funded healthcare.

For a more neutral look and a better example, see a Daily Mail article of two years ago:

Hospitals are letting patients jump NHS queues for knee and hip replacement surgery if they pay for the operations themselves.

Patients are being charged up to £14,000 for some procedures – almost treble the cost to the Health Service – leading to accusations that hospitals are ripping off the sick. Knee and hip surgery is being rationed across England, forcing some patients to wait in pain for more than a year to get to theatre.

Yet The Mail on Sunday has found that more than 40 trusts are promising patients they can have the ops in as little as a week – if they can afford it.

I don't see a problem:

a) a voluntary extra payment for a better service is not being ripped off, you pays your money and takes your choice. If the NHS doesn't do this, then surgeons will just do the operations privately for the same charge.

b) The NHS has to get money from somewhere. If it can get a bit more from better-off patients then in an ideal world and all thing being equal, either the taxpayer pays in a bit less or the NHS has a bit more money so waiting times will not go up.

c) The extra payment is just rent under the Von Thünen definition (money paid for shorter journey time) as it bears no relation to the cost of the operation, so the NHS might as well collect it as anybody else

d) It also illustrates my point that the value of a place in a queue depends on how many people are behind you, not how many are in front of you - if the normal waiting list time were two weeks, nobody would pay that much extra to get it done next week. So the NHS now has a perverse incentive to make waiting times even longer, that means it can actually boost the charge for queue jumping, that's the only downside I can see.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Is it acceptable for the NHS to allow patients to pay extra to jump the queue?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"That carpet is gold dust!"

From The Daily Mail:

A worn-out carpet in a jewellery shop workshop is worth thousands of pounds - because it is covered in specks of gold dust and platinum cuttings. The family-run shop is replacing the 15-year-old carpet, which was fitted near seven workstations where craftsmen make jewellery using the precious metals.

Now Richard Blampied, who runs Aurum Jewellers in St Helier, Jersey, with his daughter Julie, is sending the carpet to a bullion merchants where it will be burned. The leftover gold, platinum and silver will then be weighed and its monetary value returned to the business.

Reminds me of when I was a lad at printing college, we did some gold blocking, which involved putting some 'gold' backed foil on the book and printing through it.

The teacher told us that where he had started as an apprentice, they sometimes printed with 'gold' ink that actually contained a fair amount of real gold. Some clumsy clogs had knock the tin of ink onto the floor, and the stuff was so expensive, it made sense to tear up all the floorboards and sent them to the bullion merchants to recover the gold.

I could never decide whether the story was true or not, or whether it was just an apocryphal tale invented by the teacher (or by people at the place he was an apprentice) to serve as a warning, but in the light of this, I'm shifting that one into the "probably true" category.

There's generous .....

"It will also allow residents to put out two extra bags on the first collection day after Christmas, although householders are told: 'You will need to provide these bags yourself'".

Part of a tale being reported by the BBC concerning the bid by Monmouthshire council to become the "fly tipping champions"  "domestic recycling champions" of Wales

Rubbish Statistics

An infographic in an article in yesterday's Metro presents the following 'facts':

1. The average waste per person in England has fallen... to 263 kg per person per year in 2010/11.

2. During 2010, regulated waste facilities in England and Wales managed nearly 140m tonnes of waste

OK, glossing over the England-England & Wales-UK distinction:

From 1, 263 kg x 62 million people = 16 million tonnes of waste. So where do the other 124 million tonnes come from to get to the 140 million tonnes in 2?

As a reality check, we have our black dustbin emptied fortnightly with about 50 kg of rubbish in it each time, there are four of us, so that makes 312 kg each.

3. More than 40% of household waste was recycled in England in 2010/11. 50% of local authority collected waste was sent to landfill in 2010/11.

As well as the black bin, we generate probably about twice as much in recycling stuff (mainly newspapers, but also cans, bottles and plastic). So the 263 kg seems very much on the low side, and I'd guess we 'recycle' two-thirds of our waste by weight, considerably more than the 40% figure mentioned in 3. In reality, we do no such thing as recycling of course, we just separate it out nicely, which is futile as our local council does 'co-mingling', but hey, whether it really gets recycled later on, I do not know.

312 kg x 3 = 1 tonne each, times 62 million people gets us to 62 million tonnes a year, I suppose it's possible that there's as much again in industrial waste and from earthworks and construction, which might get us to the 140 million tonnes. But it's not like rocks, bricks, wood, sand and soil are in any way dangerous or harmful, you just chuck them back whence they came.

5. Every minute, 1m plastic bags are used

1 million x 60 x 24 x 365.25 = 526 billion, divide that by 62 million people means eight thousand plastic bags a year, two dozen a day, which is clearly nonsense. Maybe they mean for the entire world, which would be one-and-a-half each per week, which is perfectly plausible, probably on the low side though.

6. It takes 1,000 years for one plastic bad to completely degrade

That's quite simply not true, depending on how you define 'completely'. Or else, where are these umpteen quadzillions of plastic bags we've used over the past fifty years? Largely rotted away, that's where.

7. Each year, we generate 290m tonnes of waste

So is it 290 million or 140 million (from 2)?

8. About 2bn steel cans are recycled in Britain each year.

2,000 million cans ÷ 62 million people = 32 each per year, seems very much on the low side, but not completely unreasonable.

And so on - if the figures they quote completely contradict each other and you have to compare and contrast and do reality checks on each one, then this completely defeats the point of the exercise. I would assume that some of their figures are correct (a painted clock is right twice a day), but which ones?

Life copies satire (again)

Woman On A Raft (who now blogs here), in a thread about patio heaters of a year-and-a-half ago:

I picked up a green living catalogue from outside Neal's Yard and it said that fire bowls, chimineas etc were all OK, and double OK if you bought them from ethical suppliers, preferably having been made by Mexicans/Indonesians whatever, from clay or recycled bottletops...

All this time, I had assumed she was being ironic.

Nope.

Invisible packaging

Over at OC.

Let's round off the working day with a nice little FakeCharity

Paul has submitted Recycling Lives. The name of the charity is a rather tasteless play on words - it's objects appear to be running half-way houses for ex-convicts/the homeless and getting them to work in waste recycling. It's a textbook fakecharity website of course, although rather disappoiningly, they are inconsistent as between "Recycling Lives"(two words, capitalised) and "recyclinglives" (one word, but not capitalised), when any self-respecting fakecharity would call itself "RecyclingLives".

Their first set of accounts for Recycling Lives (UK) Limited to 30 April 2008 (filed, but not yet published at The Charities Commission, although they are already on the Companies House website) show total income of £23,585, of which £21,860 was "voluntary donations" of £21,860. On page 2 it explains that £20,000 came from The Westminster Foundation, which I assume is the one set up by the Duke of Westminster, rather than The Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which is funded by The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (not "Colonial"!).

On page 2 they also explain that:

In partnership with a range of partners, including the North West Development Agency, Preston City Council, Lancashire Probation Service, Lancashire Adult Services, the University of Central Lancashire, the Preston Homeless Network, HM Prisons Kirkham, Preston, Wymott & Haverigg, and a range of many other statutory and voluntary service providers, [our] new premises in Kent Street will offer a holistic range of services to the socially excluded.

So basically, it's part of the probation service. Why do they bother dressing it up as a charity?

This is only the tip of the iceberg of course, the building itself is owned by a separate company called Recycling Lives Limited. There are plenty of other government bodies, quangos and fakecharities in its list of "partners" of course: AutoBreakers, Business Action on Homelessness, Department for Communities & Local Government: Hostels Capital Improvement Programme, Emmaus Preston, Fox Street Community Night Shelter, HM Prison Service, Homeless Link, Lancashire College, Lancashire County Council, National Probation Service, New Reg, NHS Lancashire Care, North West Regional Development Agency, Preston City Council, Progress Recruitment, Shelter, University Of Central Lancashire.

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'.

"Million cars are scrapped illegally"

Says The Metro.

1. There are extremes here - taking your old car to a local beauty spot, removing the number plates and torching it is obviously Not Acceptable; trying to comply with EU reg's is just as mad in the other direction. So somebody has to decide what a sensible minimum standard is.

2. Disposal has to be paid for. The best way of raising the money is a flat tax on new cars (or per ton weight, or something), as I have suggested before ...

3. ... which will hopefully encourage people to run their old cars for longer - don't forget that building a new car and scrapping the old one causes as much pollution as the new car (being, let's assume, more fuel efficient) saves in several years.

4. The MW government will of course scrap VAT post haste (15% of list price of a car, i.e. thousands of pounds), but how much will the 'disposal tax' have to be? From the article "... the End of Life Vehicle Recyclers Association, says authorised dealers are losing £200million a year - half the industry's value - to illegal merchants. The government's own estimates say only 900,000 of the 2million cars scrapped this year will have a certificate to prove they were disposed of legally", so that looks like about £200 per car (i.e. it costs £400 to do, but they get about £200 a ton for the scrap steel. So the 'disposal tax' would be about £100 per ton weight of the new car, a damn' sight less than VAT.

5. Enforcement is two-pronged, scrap dealers would fill in a form, the former owner sends off his copy to DVLA (he has to continue to pay RFL until he does, let's say) and Dept for The Enviroment goes round authorised scrapyards, and provided they seem to be complying by the rules (e.g. if they claim for 100 cars, the inspector has to be shown receipts for the onward sale of 150 tons of steel, payment to an authorised incinerator for removing 100 old batteries and so on), give them £200 for every car disposed of, cross-referenced to DVLA.

That's that fixed. Next.