Noxious waste should be collected every week, and if they want us to recycle, let them make additional provision for that.

This has already ben adequately refuted by Tim Newman and Monty; Throwing composite rubbish that needs disecting before binning clearly IS going to take longer. Rinsing tin cans of food residue before puttin in the recycling takes time too.

” Nobody pays me for my spare time. So it doesn’t actually cost me anything except hassle, and rage against the EU.”

Oh, so time spent doing something you don’t want to do is not a cost! Hassle is not a cost! (These are rhetorical exclamation points, hassle and time are both costs).

We are not short of landfill space, even in England. What we are short of, is permission from our overlords in Brussels to actually use our own land for the purpose we want – that is, in this case, landfill.

Also I refute this cost thing – again! – thusly:

1. It takes no longer to throw the item in one bin than in another. Sorting? Who needs to do that? Only if you put all your rubbish in one big heap and THEN go back and sort it. Who does that?

2. Nobody pays me for my spare time. So it doesn’t actually cost me anything except hassle, and rage against the EU.

I really don’t care; it’s their decision to separate it (I know they have “targets” and there’s EuroLegislation, but ultimately, it’s a decision made by political types), so they should eat the cost. Personally, I would just dump it in a big hole in the ground because there’s no shortage of them.

I know a guy who used to work for a waste management company. They would buy a piece of land and dig a hole in it. They would sell the stuff that came out of the hole, sell the space in hole for dumping stuff, then when the hole was full, they would sell the land again. Of course, that was in sensible times, before “landfill tax”, and other EuroBollocks.

“small” is subjective. 5 pound a week (say) is not subjective. Whether you or I think the figures involves are small or large is a matter of opinion. What is not a matter of opinion is that in doing a cost benefit analysis, one has to add up all the costs. This is clearly NOT done in the case of recycling.

The problem here seems to be one of arithmetic, you do not seem able to grasp that when a small value is multiplied by a large number, the resulting value can be significant.

So where do you put the glass jar half filled with mouldy jam? Where does the cardboard box filled with polystyrene, paper, and plastic which your new computer came in go?

Anyone can see that it is as quick to throw a piece of paper in a paper bin as it is to throw it in one combined bin. But not all rubbish is conveniently separated before it needs to go in the bin. If I have to spend 5 minutes cleaning the mouldy jam out of the jar and putting the jam in the organic waste bin and the jar in the glass bin, that is an effort which is measurable. Try getting a teenage kid to do it willingly if you don’t believe me.

Tim is right: if this is so easy and takes no effort, there would be no need to fine people for not doing it.

Yes, people are strange like that; when they pay someone to do work for them, they expect that work to be done.

Governments at all levels are not elected to impose burdens on us, the people who pay their wages. They are elected to provide services to the people of the country.

Among the services the local government is elected to perform is rubish collection. That they have now decided, without any attempt to canvas my views on the matter, to impose an expensive and time consuming burden on me is simply not acceptable.

In addition to using my money to provide the various bins, boxes, vehicles and personnel that they need in order to impose this extra burden, they have also chosen to employ whole departments to do things that are not their business and which they are in no position to accomplish. To add insult to injury, they then fail at their primary tasks, (including rubbish collection), when there is a hint of inclement weather.

Now if you wish to sort your rubbish into separate piles and have it collected seperately, then feel free to buy the necessary bins etc, and employ a collection agency to gather all your trash, but don’t impose your fetish on me, and don’t charge me for the privilege.

Really!

It’s not so hard to do it at source as you throw it away. It takes a few seconds to chuck things into one big bin – from which it might take an hour for someone down the line to sort out the chaos you hae intentionally created and which you ought to pay for.

I takes no longer to chuck things into 4/5/6/7 smaller bins and thus add t0 the value add of the society. Admittedly, you would have to organise yourselves and not expect people to do work for you.

Well, if you take 5 minutes a day out of that slack, then that is 5 minutes slack that you can’t use elsewhere. No matter how you slice it, you can’t claim that is isn’t a cost. It is a cost, even to you. The fact that the cost is so small that you don’t bother to calculate it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The time I spend sorting, I would rather spend having a cuppa, or commenting on a blog article, or feeding the cat, or having a cigarette. I have a huge variety of things I would rather do with a spare 5 mins than sorting rubbish, as would most people. I suspect if someone gave you as a gift a machine with zero ecological impact that sorted your rubbish for you, you would not spend every day keeping it company while it did it because you had nothing better to do.

“(ChrisM, am I imagining things, or did you just try to explain saying insist others value their time at zero by citing a passage in which I explicitly refer to people not like me, i.e. with different valuations?).”

Granted, you are not insisting that I value my time at zero, you are insisting that my time is valued at zero, because some other people claim that they value their own time at zero. I stand corrected.

Whatever that number is (admit it might be hugely different one way or another to how much it costs if householders do it) it is some evidence that there is a cost to this venture.

In a similar vein could someone explain to the ladies in my office who think I should wash my own dishes “because it only takes a minute” that it is far more beneficial to the company that the cleaner who earns half as much as I and adds little value is the correct person to clean dishes. )

this is where the silliness becomes evident. Do you think that if we ended recycling, we’d be able to increase real output (including leisure) in similar order to as if we reallocated all the labour expended in the army?

If people can (mostly) fit a few extra minutes sorting their rubbish into their lives without sacrificing anything else, you don’t add up the cost like that. In the extreme case, the opportunity cost is zero. I’m not arguing for an extreme case, just that the true cost is way below your sum total. I’m sure some people do miss valuable moments of leisure time because of having to recycle, but as I said already, I’m sure most people’s days include enough wasted time, slack, scope for increasing ‘efficiency’ (i.e. putting food waste into a special bin whilst telling your wife about your day at work, or whatever) to mean the real cost is negligible. This doesn’t mean you “value your time at zero” it just means there’s some wiggle room; that’s what slackness means.

Now, obviously this is a slipperly slope, it only works for small perturbations, and they can add up etc.

(ChrisM, am I imagining things, or did you just try to explain saying insist others value their time at zero by citing a passage in which I explicitly refer to people not like me, i.e. with different valuations?).

I got the idea from this.

” I am arguing that when everything is taken into account, across all manner of individuals, including those like you and those like me, the time-cost of recycling isn’t quantitatively important.”

Tim adds: That’s how the costs add up. 15 minutes a week per household? Pah! A mere bagatelle! Err, 52 weeks a year, 24 million households….300 million hours a year. Or 150,000 people full time. Bigger than the man hours that goes into the entire British Army.

Looking at some of my old haunts on Google Street View, I have seen houses with four large plastic bins on the driveway. In our house, the bins and boxes fill half the garage, which means I can’t get the car in there anymore. But the alternative is to make the front of my house into an eyesore.

Alex