Will recycling your rubbish save the planet?

The Telegraph 31 May 08;

Do your empty bottles find a new lease of life after you creep out with the rubbish at the crack of dawn? Eco-sceptic Max Davidson reports

It is waste collection day, which means an early start. The binmen arrive just after 7am, so by 6.30 I am in my kitchen, sorting my rubbish.

Rinse glass bottles and put them in the green box.

Wash-and-squash plastic bottles and put them in the blue box.

Cans here, newspapers there. I could do it in my sleep.

By 6.55, I am carting the boxes out into the street. Others are doing the same.

Spectral figures in dressing-gowns flit through the morning mist. Neighbour peers at neighbour.

Blimey! She's got through a lot of whisky. Does he read the Daily Mail? I had him down as a Guardian man.

The clink of empty bottles drowns the birdsong.

Why do I do it? I do it because I do it. I used to cudgel my brain and try to decipher the logic of the coloured boxes. Why did envelopes go in the blue box, but paper in the green box? Why were yogurt cartons not allowed in either? Why were plastic bottles OK, but not plastic bags? Now, like millions, I just do it.

They trained us to wear seat belts and now they have trained us to recycle rubbish. At daybreak, a time when our grandparents used to tramp through smog to the factories and their grandparents were out ploughing the fields, we are sitting on the kitchen floor, squashing cardboard boxes or peering at the labels on tins of soup. It doesn't feel like progress.

The idea that recycling, or some forms of it, could be a waste of time is so heretical that one hardly dares think it, let alone say it. But is that unthinking obedience healthy? Should we be asking tougher questions of the high priests of this new religion?

Take those empty wine bottles, the ones I put in my green box, along with the newspapers. The newspapers I understand. They will come back, theoretically anyway, as other newspapers, made from recycled paper.

But how many of the wine bottles will come back as wine bottles? Most of them originated in France, so the idea of smashing them, recycling the glass into new bottles, then transporting them across the Channel to a grateful vineyard owner in Burgundy or the Languedoc seems optimistic, at an economic level.

But, none the less, the drive to recycle more and more bottles continues apace. The great thing about glass, we are told, is that it can be recycled indefinitely. Less carbon dioxide is produced when making glass from recycled containers than when making it from scratch; 315kg of CO2, according to official figures, are saved for every tonne of glass melted.

In environmental terms, it is a no-brainer. Or is it? To a layman like me, happy to recycle my rubbish but not always sure about the scientific rationale for doing so, there is such a blizzard of facts and figures swirling around the subject that it is hard to know which ones are really relevant.

One oft-quoted statistic is that the glass recycled in the UK every year saves enough energy to launch 10 space shuttle missions. But who wants to launch 10 space shuttle missions? I am not washing bottles and getting up at six in the morning just so some geek in a space suit can loop the loop around the Moon.

On average, according to another statistic, each household in the UK uses 331 glass bottles and jars a year; recycling rather than dumping them would save enough energy to power a computer for five days. That's a bit better. That I can relate to. Wouldn't want the old computer packing up because I hadn't put my bottles out.

But, again, do we need to have as many computers as we do? Aren't they an environmental extravagance? Shakespeare used a quill and didn't leave a carbon footprint in his life.

Here's another easy-to-grasp statistic from the recycling-for-idiots manual: recycling two wine bottles saves enough energy to boil water for five cups of tea. But wait! I don't drink tea. Can't stand it. Does that mean that, by not boiling the kettle for tea, I'm saving enough energy not to have to recycle the wine bottles?

There's so much hidden moralising in this arcane world, so much telling people what they "ought" to be doing, that we sometimes tie ourselves in knots, salving our consciences without, at a practical level, doing anything particularly useful for the environment.

With glass, one of the big problems is the imbalance between the different colours. Historically, the UK imports twice as much green glass - the kind found in wine bottles - as it manufactures. So when the recycled green glass, or cullet, emerges from the processing plants, the question arises of what to do with it. Not all of it can be recycled as bottles (although mine, I was gratified to discover, does - see below). A lot of it used to end up as ashtrays, but that is hardly a boom market these days.