Recycled Rubbish is Still Rubbish

A single mother of three was recently dragged into court by Exeter County Council for the unmutal crime of not sorting her recycling properly. She won her case, but unfortunately not on the grounds that the council are a load of green-mad busybodies who should be spending more time picking up litter and scrubbing graffiti if they want to help the environment.

Rob Lyons at Spiked looked at the case and sums up the bizarre modern obsession with recycling nicely:

Household recycling only makes sense as the practical form of a morality tale: that humans are essentially greedy and rapacious. The physical expression of that greed is the amount of rubbish we create. The lesson is that we should all rein in our expectations and demand less - be less "thoughtless" and more "selfless", to use the councillor's words.

I've never had any truck with household recyling, as it's pretty much the medieval hair shirt reintroduced by those who have no intention of wearing it themselves. Industrial and agricultural recycling makes perfect sense and has been in practice for about, oh, 45,000 years, but the modern fetish that local authorities foists upon us, outside of some very special cases, doesn't make a lick of economic or environmental sense. If it did, private companies would be paying us for our unsorted rubbish and hauling it away free of charge.