Recycling to save the planet: another great environmental hoax

The green enthusiasts for recycling commonly suggest the following:

• Expanding recycling of plastics (just 12 per cent of the 103kg of plastic consumed per person was recycled in 2016-17).
• Forcing households to further sort and wash their recycled material, including separating soft and hard plastic.
• Introducing organic waste collection and container deposit schemes in states/territories that still have not introduced them.
• Educating the public about how to better recycle. (Common mistakes are said to include putting soft plastics into the kerbside recycling bin, putting bagged recyclable material into recycling bins, and puttingfood scraps, organic waste, soiled disposable nappies, or other non-recyclables into recycling bins.)

They also propose a long term recycling aim of "Zero Waste"

The problem with these proposals is that they would merely add further costs to existing uneconomic recycling. Additionally, it is simply not economically possible to live totally waste-free.

A sensible outcome would be to move in the opposite direction advocated by the greens, and to only recycle those items, whose salvage value exceeds the recovery cost. Items such as plastics and paper should be incinerated or (along with unwanted glass) go to landfill.

While I agree that there is a major problem with plastics in the environment, we are told that 90 per cent of the plastic in the sea comes out of ten rivers in Africa and Asia, something out of Australia's control. There may be scope to encourage use of glass bottles instead of plastic ones or to develop more biodegradable plastics. As much food comes wrapped in plastic for safety reasons, it is impractical to attempt the total elimination of plastic packaging.

An under-discussed issue is that about 800 million disposable nappies end up in Australian landfills every year, with approximately 91 per cent of Australian parents (for obvious reasons) preferring to use disposables. The recycling lobby, however, is somewhat muted in its support for reusable cloth nappies and wipes (a women's issue?). This is despite disposable nappies being both a lot more expensive to use, and taking as long as 500 years to decompose in landfill.

I don't support banning or heavily taxing disposable nappies. It would, however, seem that (for the majority of recycling enthusiasts) virtue seems to have its limit!