Boris has really surpassed himself with the naïvité of today’s policy announcement: give people vouchers in return for their recycling.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? On the surface of it, perhaps it does. But if you stop and think about it for longer than he evidently has, guess what? It turns out to be an illogical idea with a negative environmental impact.

The mantra of environmental experts when it comes to waste has long been Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The point of this list is that they are in priority order. You should reduce your consumption of the planet’s resources as a top priority: if you never consume a resource, no environmental harm is done. You should reuse an item if at all possible - by refilling that water bottle you bought with tap water, you don’t need to buy another one, so although the initial purchase had an impact, that impact won’t be repeated as often.

Only after these two have been done as much as possible should you move on to actually disposing of something, by recycling it. Recycling takes energy, machinery, perhaps some extra materials, and of course big trucks driving around picking it all up. While it’s obviously preferable to landfill or incineration, it’s not a way to save the planet in and of itself, any more than eating two low-calorie ‘Diet’ chocolate bars is healthier than eating one. (Disappointing, I know.)

Boris’s plan is to weigh people’s recycling, and the heavier it is, the more vouchers they get given. This is rewarding people for breaking the first two rules as much as possible - the more you consume and then the less of it you reuse before recycling it, the more vouchers you will get! This is green politics for idiots - perhaps unsurprising when a prize idiot without the first clue about the environment is spearheading it.

I could go on longer about this but I won’t - instead I’ll point out another problem with this so-called policy.

The Mayor of London doesn’t actually have any powers over recycling. To call this a policy is therefore a bit rich - it’s more of an aspiration.

Boris reckons he’d get the London Boroughs on side, but that seems unlikely in most cases. Most boroughs have already chosen their path to encouraging recycling, and in many cases they’ve done so in ways that are fundamentally difficult to reconcile with this idea.

For instance, in response to media scare stories about charging people for waste collection by weight, several councils have made a point of publicising the fact that none of their bins or recycling receptacles contain microchips to enable this to happen, so their residents can sleep easy. Boris’s plan would therefore require a wholesale replacement of all those bins and boxes, to allow the weighed boxes to be traced back to the households in order to issue the vouchers.

Will the cash-strapped councils be expected to pay for all these new bins and any new technology? Or is Boris stumping up the money? Either way, it’ll be taxpayers’ money, which he’s usually pretty keen on saving. Oh and what are all these replacement plastic bins made from? Oh yes, oil. Good green policy, this.

If this policy is intended to save on waste going to landfill, as he claims, then the only way to do this is to do something based on the weight of waste going to landfill, but of course that would be more difficult to do as an incentive rather than a punishment.

Boris has long been an outspoken critic of anything with a whiff of punishment for polluting behaviour - e.g. describing the Low Emission Zone as “the most punitive, draconian fining regime in the whole of Europe” - so he only wants to adopt incentives, not punishments. But then, one person’s incentive is another’s punishment - if the vouchers are all being funded out of tax, and some people get more of them than others, aren’t the ones receiving fewer vouchers effectively being punished?

So in summary, this policy is illogical, back-to-front and near-impossible to implement. No wonder Boris doesn’t want to discuss the issues.

This entry was posted on Thursday 27 March 2008 at 22.31 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under Environment, Policies, Recycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.