Have We All Been Conned? Recycling's The New State Religion But Once Again it's Been Exposed as a Sham

Like millions of other people, I spend a lot of time every week recycling rubbish. Newspapers have to go in one box, but magazines for some unexplained reason must be put in another.
Wine bottles - not completely unknown in our house - belong to still another. Then there are plastic bottles and metal cans to contend with, not to mention leaves, cut grass and other garden waste.
It is quite a palaver, I can tell you. I suppose that, if one added up all the minutes one stands above this or that bin puzzling as to whether to throw in this or that item, I must spend between half an hour and an hour a week recycling. And then there is the business of humping the boxes out into the road, and trying to pilot wheelie bins which don't actually wheel at all well over bumps. I am still relatively hale and hearty, but God knows how I would manage if I were not.

If asked to get rid of a carton or bottle, which seldom happens, they peer at it as though they have never seen such an object before. Blessed are they that do not have to recycle. Alas, millions of us have to, and we live in daily fear of being fined or upbraided by officious council representatives for getting our bins in a muddle.

Why do we go on doing it? I suppose we like to be on the right side of the law, even though we suspect in our hearts that the law as it relates to rubbish is pretty dodgy. And I expect that many of us, though somewhat sceptical, still harbour a distant hope that we may somehow be helping the planet by ensuring that too many nasty tins and bottles aren't buried in Britain's green and pleasant land. We may also imagine we are somehow limiting the ill-effects of climate change, and helping unfortunate polar bears in the Arctic.

But are we? Probably not, according to Peter Jones, an expert on waste who advises the Government and the Mayor of London. Mr Jones suggests that 'the global warming impact of putting material through an incinerator five miles down the road is actually less than recycling it 3,000 miles away'. In other words, fewer greenhouse gases are produced if you burn rubbish locally than if you sort it and send it halfway round the world.

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