The Great Rubbish Bonanza

Posted by Ben

There is an old saying ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’ and a couple of years ago in a fairly relaxed state in a public house, I surmised that in the future clever entrepreneurs would be mining landfill sites for all sorts of thrown away goodies because the cost of raw materials would rocket as scarce materials ran out. To be frank, I hadn’t predicted the extraordinary rise in the cost of a barrel of oil and the immediate impact this has had on all manner of manufacturing industries as well as travel and transport. And the cost of materials, increasing green taxes and the imminent cost in a carbon footprint through the EU Emission Trading Scheme seems to have directly led to a sudden shift in the business climate towards proactive recycling. It pays to be green.

So lets start with the bad news - well  the bad news is that in the UK alone we throw away 13 billion plastic bottles weighing 250,000 tonnes each year - and that 9.8 billion plastic bottles end up in landfill annually. What’s even more depressing is that 1.5 tonnes of CO2 would be saved for each tonne of plastic recycled. But suddenly the cost of oil has made recycling plastic very attractive - very attractive indeed, and plans are afoot to build new recycling plants to recycle all sorts of plastics.  Why is this? well in n 2002 ’waste’ mixed plastic bottle were worth between £10-30 per tonne. Now each tonne is worth between £180-£230. That’s at least a six fold increase. And its not just the value in plastics which has increased - the price of copper has risen from £760 a tonne in 2002 to £3100 in 2007, the value of paper has doubled since 2002 and glass is up 50%. More band news again - this all makes a bit of a mockery of what is in our bins which still contain about a quarter paper, a quarter food waste, 10% plastics, 8% glass, 4% metals and 3% textiles. Most of this could be recycled and what’s more, most of this could go into a profitable business now.  This starts to explain why all of a sudden everyone from local authorities to big business have an economic drive to get green - it makes business sense as well as environmental sense.

To be fair even without economic incentives, local authorities are under ever increasing pressure to increase recycling to meet EU targets on reducing landfill, and indeed increasing Treasury taxes on landfill (this year £32/tonne, next year £40/tonne - and up to £48/tonne by 2010-11) have meant an ever increasing £1.5 billion for local authorities for disposing of our waste. Again there is good and bad news - recycling rates have risen from 7% in 1998 to 33% in 2008 - and waste sent to landfill finally decreased between 2006 and 2007 (16.9 million tonnes to 15.8 million tonnes as household waste fell marginally from 25.8 million tonnes to 25.6 million tonnes. But it will be a tad annoying for some council tax payers that a number of local authorities have tied in their waste contracts to big businesses under long term contracts (why DO they do that?) which means the contractor will take all of the profit from the shift in the economic climate of waste disposal towards recycling although clever councils like Westminster have already admitted that they will benefit financially from the rising rates in the value of recycled waste as they share profits with their contractors.  Individua homeowners may find it difficult to ever amass enough recycling to ever make anything ‘green gold’ but in the music industry venues and festivals in particular might soon start looking at on-site waste in a very different way indeed - and finding out how a load of all rubbish might actually be something to sing about.

Source: The Times   11 August 2008   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4500681.ece

Source: DEFRA

Source: www.letsrecycle.com