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Recycling Idiocy

Sadly, another indication that we are ruled by idiots.

With pilot schemes already going well, within two to three years she is determined to see pails of rotting food routinely collected along with the rubbish, then processed at local plants to generate electricity. She foresees a day when every town will have its own anaerobic digester.

The aim of all of this is to stop food going into landfill where it rots and produces methane. "She" is the head of WRAP, the organisation trying to get us all to recycle more.

But why is this idiocy? Why not do this?

Well, the thing is that food that goes into landfill goes through anaerobic decay to produce that methane. Which is then collected and used to generate energy. The proposal is that we should all have rotting food in our houses, waiting for the weekly collection, have a new and discrete collection system (with all of the associated emissions) and new plants, one in every town, where the food wastes can go through anaerobic decay so that the methane can be collected and used to generate energy.

That is, that we\’re going to do what we already do, just in a new and vastly expensive manner, a method with higher, not lower, emissions.

As I say, we\’re ruled by idiots.

7 thoughts on “Recycling Idiocy”

  1. Of course there was a time when 1.7 million tonnes of biodegradable waste a year was turned into pork via swill feeders with no need of subsidies. But it was banned without compensation by the Labour Government.

  2. “The proposal is that we should all have rotting food in our houses…”

    Nothing is too much to honour mighty Gaia! Stone the heretics who disagree!!!

  3. Tim, I am confused.

    I thought that you thought that collecting methane from rotting food and using it to generate electricity was a good idea, CH4* being a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2, to the extent that you believe in this MMGW nonsense in the first place.

    * Which is in turn not as bad as nitrous oxide, but 95% of ‘greenhouse gases’ are naturally occurring ozone and, er, clouds.

    Tim adds: Get a grip will you? Yes, collecting methane is a good idea. But wy not just do what we do already…..collect it at the landfill?

  4. Don’t we already have rotting food in our houses waiting for weekly collection, by the bin men? I don’t see much of a problem in having two bins, one for organic waste and one for inorganic. It may be a problem for people in flats who have space constraints but if it is a voluntary scheme then this is less of a problem. As you point out, there will be costs associated with having two seperate collection mechanisms so they will need to take this into account when calculating whether it is worth doing but I think it is at least worth looking at.

  5. “Voluntary schemes” set up by governments rarely stay voluntary for long. Collecting the methane in situ at the landfills is a better and cheaper idea…and one that takes almost no additional money to implement, since it is a matter-of-course currently.

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