Do you ever wonder why people recycle old newspapers? To save precious trees, you might think. But trees are a renewable resource, if grown in managed forests and replanted as quickly as they are cut down. Transporting old newspapers to recycling plants, on the other hand, uses up non-renewable fossil fuel. So is it conceivable that recycling newspapers does more harm than good?
Inside the vast Aylesford Newsprint recycling plant on the banks of the River Medway in Kent, doubts such as these feel like heresy. Here, one in seven of Britain's newspapers and magazines, totalling 500,000 tonnes of paper a year, are deposited by the UK waste industry and, instead of being dumped, are turned back into newsprint that is sold to newspaper publishers in Britain and continental Europe.
On arriving at the plant, the newspapers are pulped with water and chemicals, then soap is added to lift the inks. After being screened for staples, bits of plastic and other unwanted materials, the pulp is fed into one of two giant, thundering paper machines, the fastest of which spews out clean, fresh newsprint at speeds of up to 60mph.
It is an impressive sight. This plant alone, though by no means Europe's largest, supplies 1 per cent of the world's newsprint, all of it from recycled product. But this is not a philanthropic operation run by a bunch of tree-huggers - it is a strictly commercial venture exploiting a cheap and plentiful resource to make a profit. So how can we be sure it is doing the environment good?
In Britain, many householders believe that, on a practical, day-to-day basis, recycling old newspapers and packaging materials is the single most important thing they can do help the environment. That is hardly surprising: throwing stuff away, after all, seems such a waste. Yet things are rarely so simple. And sure enough, the world of recycling is riddled with myths and paradoxes.
Myth number one is that household recycling is vital to prevent resource depletion. In fact, of the materials we recycle - paper, glass, steel, aluminium and plastic - most are in no danger of running out in the foreseeable future. Paper, as already noted, comes from a renewable resource and glass is made from sand, one of the most abundant materials on earth. Aluminium and iron are the world's two most abundant metals, together making up 14 per cent of the earth's crust.
Admittedly, the raw material for plastic is oil, and the era of cheap oil may well be over. But if we are now entering an era of expensive oil, vast deposits previously thought to have been too costly to develop will become economically recoverable.
More important, though, is that recycling household waste makes little difference to resource depletion because the quantities involved are too small. Most raw materials go not into our homes but into construction, manufacturing, engineering, shipbuilding, aerospace, defence and the automotive industry; into the building of cities, ports, factories, machines, aircraft, bridges and trains; and into the supplies consumed by offices, shops, hotels, restaurants, government buildings, hospitals and schools. So the sort of recycling that makes a difference occurs outside the home, not in it.
Consider, for example, the steel industry. British households recycled 150,000 to 170,000 tonnes of food and drink cans last year, according to industry estimates. It sounds a lot, yet it accounted for barely 2 per cent of the total ferrous scrap recycled in the UK, the rest coming from sources such as demolition, manufacturing waste and end-of-life vehicles. "The vast majority of recycled steel comes from commerce and industry because that is where steel is used," says John May, manager of Corus Steel Packaging Recycling, Britain's biggest buyer of recycled steel cans. "Compared with the millions of tonnes of steel recycled each year in the UK, the amount derived from the household dustbin is tiny."
Myth number two is that we face a crisis over where to put our growing mountains of household rubbish. Facetiously, one could point out that, since most of what we consume comes out of the ground, there must be more than enough room for our residual waste to go back in. But, even accepting that the holes are not always in the right places, there is still plenty of quarrying going on in Britain, creating large, ugly excavations that beg to be filled.
As in myth number one, however, a more important consideration is that household rubbish is only a very small part of the problem. One statistic you rarely hear is that household rubbish accounts for less than a tenth of the waste produced in Britain. The rest comes from industry, commerce, construction, demolition, mining, quarrying and agriculture.
To be fair, a lot of the non-domestic waste is recycled rather than dumped: the steel industry, for example achieves a recycling rate as high as 70 per cent. So household waste accounts for about 20 per cent of the rubbish going to landfill. Still, a simple calculation shows that even if householders managed to recycle as much as half their rubbish instead of a quarter as at present, the total amount of waste going to landfill in Britain would fall by only 5 per cent.
So if household recycling makes little difference either to resource depletion or the demand for landfill, why bother?
Well, every little helps. And one indisputable benefit of household recycling is that, by involving people personally in the effort to reduce waste, it greatly increases their environmental awareness.
But most scientists now believe climate change is by far the most serious environmental threat facing the human race. So the value of recycling lies, above all, in the extent to which it reduces emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
It is here that the uncertainties start creeping in. When you think of all the energy consumed (and hence, carbon dioxide emitted) during the recycling process - householders driving their empty wine bottles to the bottle bank, lorries collecting the bottles and taking them to the recycling plant, the washing in hot water and the removal of labels, all before the reprocessing can even begin - it is plain that recycling has environmental costs as well as benefits.
One example: disposable nappies are widely assumed to be an environmental menace because of the enormous amount of waste they produce. But last year, the Environment Agency, a government body in charge of environmental protection in England and Wales, caused a stir by publishing a 209-page report showing that disposables were no worse for the planet than reusable cloth nappies that have to be laundered in hot water and detergent and then dried each time they are soiled.
Terry Coleman, the agency's strategic waste and resource manager, says the study took no account of the landfill space taken up by disposables "because I don't think there is a shortage of space across the UK, although there are local shortages". Instead, the study put the greatest emphasis on the emissions produced by the two nappy systems - largely during manufacturing for disposables and largely during laundering for reusables - "and the emissions were the same".
That sort of environmental cost/benefit analysis explains why, paradoxically, it can sometimes be better to incinerate waste than to recycle it. The Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment, which speaks for companies in the packaged goods industry, supports recycling of most materials. However, it points out that some waste materials - crisp packets, yoghurt pots, microwaveable meal trays and the like - are simply not worth recycling because it takes a disproportionate amount of energy to collect, clean and transport them. Far better to incinerate them in power-generating, energy-from-waste plants: that way, each unit of energy released from the waste creates an equivalent reduction in demand for electricity generated from fossil fuels.
Paper presents another paradox. "The argument as to whether you should recycle or burn paper has been going on for 25 years," says Professor Roland Clift of the Centre for Environmental Strategy at Surrey University. "The answer isn't simple. It depends on the background energy economy of the country where you're operating."
To understand why, you need to know two things: first, that incinerating paper, trees and other biofuels is seen as carbon neutral because living matter sucks up as much carbon dioxide from the air while it is growing as it emits when it is burned, and second, that the main newsprint producing countries of Europe (Sweden and Finland) use mainly non-fossil fuels for power generation.
So, as Clift explains, if you are in a country such as Britain where less coal is burned when the demand for energy falls, it makes sense to incinerate used paper in an energy-from-waste plant and import fresh paper from northern Europe, because less coal will get burned overall. "And so it turns out that the net effect is a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions."
Clift emphasises that he is speaking in broad terms: the economics of office paper, for example, work in favour of recycling, and he makes no judgment on the merits of the Aylesford Newsprint plant. The company addressed this very issue in 1998 when it published the results of an analysis it had commissioned showing that recycling at the plant was in most ways environmentally preferable to incineration with energy recovery.
Indeed, there are plenty of other cases where recycling makes environmental sense. A good example is aluminium, which requires vast amounts of electricity to refine from ore but only about 5 per cent as much energy to recycle. Or, more surprisingly: one of the recycling industry's little secrets is that a lot of the paper and plastic collected in Britain ends up in the Far East, notably China, because there is more demand for it there. As it goes back in shipping containers that were used to import manufactured goods and would otherwise have gone back empty, even this can benefit the environment.
As it happens, the Waste & Resources Action Programme, a government-funded body that tries to create markets for recycled materials, has just published a comprehensive review of the available research on recycling worldwide, concluding that most programmes, in most circumstances, create a net environmental gain.
The catch is, even by the best estimates of the Waste & Resources Action Programme, which presumably takes an optimistic view of such matters, all the recycling of packaging materials currently undertaken in the UK, by industry and commerce as well as by ordinary households, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by only 10m-15m tonnes a year - little more than a rounding error in the context of the UK's annual emissions of 660m tonnes, not to mention the millions more emitted in countries from which the UK imports manufactured goods.
So why are we so obsessed with recycling? More specifically, why have people been encouraged to believe that recycling is the most important thing they can do to help the environment?
Perhaps because recycling is a vote-winner. The wonderful thing about it is that it makes almost everyone involved feel better about themselves while requiring no one to make any real sacrifice. In fact, it arguably encourages consumer spending because the more goods people buy, the more they can virtuously recycle.
If, on the other hand, people really wanted to make an impact on greenhouse gas emissions, they would have to make big sacrifices - so big that it is hard to imagine any government having the courage to advocate them.
People's top priority, for example, would need to be a reduction in their consumption of goods. Recycling bits of packaging is as nothing compared with the vast savings in energy and resources that could be made if people bought fewer products. The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions is the energy used to manufacture and deliver the goods that end up in our homes - furniture, kitchen equipment, televisions, toys, computers, clothes and food. You do not need to recycle if you do not buy anything in the first place.
The implications of lower consumption, however, hardly bear thinking about. True, we could be encouraged to spend more of our money on services and less on tangible goods. Even so, we would very likely be looking at the prospect of perpetual recession or worse - anathema to governments for which the annual rate of economic growth is a virility symbol.
So, apart from consuming less, what should you really be doing to help the environment? Assuming you have already done all the obvious things such as insulating the loft, turning down the central heating and banning the school run:
1. Never, ever, fly on an aircraft again. Air travel is enormously damaging in terms of climate change and any government that genuinely cared about the environment would be pricing people out of the skies with unbelievably high levels of taxation on air travel. As it is, aviation fuel is completely untaxed internationally and governments almost everywhere have encouraged the proliferation of cheap flights, making air travel more popular and more environmentally damaging than ever.
2 . Call on the government to ban incandescent light bulbs, which turn 90 per cent of the energy they consume into wasted heat. Instead, everyone would use the newer compact fluorescent lamps. Admittedly these are green in more ways than one, enveloping their unfortunate users in a ghastly green glare but the energy savings would be colossal - enough to shut down a power station or two.
3. Switch to a diet of ready meals and McDonald's. It takes much less energy to make a mass produced meal than to assemble all the ingredients at home and cook them yourself. It also produces less waste. If you can take yourself to a centralised meal distribution depot such as McDonald's, so much the better, as long as you leave the 4x4 in the garage and take the bus.
4. Speaking of gas-guzzlers, obviously you should trade in your 4x4 for a Toyota Prius. But even trading it in for an ordinary family saloon would save as much energy in a year as your household would save if it spent the next 400 years recycling glass bottles. Then again, if you care about climate change, what on earth are you doing driving at all?
5. Sell the second home. Just think how much environmental damage is done by the duplication of household goods. Even worse, just think of all the journeys that the second home generates. It is bad enough if you drive there and back each weekend but if you are using cheap flights - really, are you trying to destroy the planet single-handed?
6. Lower your standards of personal hygiene. Apart from the energy that goes into making the goods we buy, the next biggest source of energy consumption in the home is hot water. So, shower once a week at most and wash your clothes less often. If anyone complains about a funny smell, blame global emissions.
7. Forget, for a moment, the edict about cutting consumption and buy a whole new set of domestic appliances. Modern washing machines, dryers and dishwashers are much more energy-efficient than old ones and the environment will benefit in the long run, assuming you resist the temptation to fly-tip the old machines.
8. If you must buy any other manufactured product, make sure it comes from a country that uses renewable energy sources, such as Sweden, not fossil fuels, such as China. It must also be made out of renewable materials, such as wood, not non-renewables, such as plastic. In short: the only place you can shop is Ikea. ..TX 9 Consider joining the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a so-called deep ecology organisation that believes we should phase out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed. Then reject the idea. What, after all, is the point of saving the planet if there is no one left to enjoy it?10 Recycle if you like but do not kid yourself that it will make a lot of difference. The ugly truth is that saving the planet really will mean sacrifices, however much we may like to pretend otherwise. The old rule applies: no pain, no gain - for the environment, as for everything else.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
