Environmentalists damaging environment yet again

This is turning into a bit of a recurring theme isn't it? The lastest example of our green friends ability to trash the environment is a U-turn on the advice issued to local councils on collecting domestic rubbish. Having previously suggested alternate weekly collections of waste, WRAP is now telling them to collect food waste every week. So instead of having one visit per week, we are now going to have one and a half. That's a 50% increase in related emissions.

Source here. 

Comments

[bgp]

Not exactly. If food waste constitutes 30% (say) of the average household's waste, the weekly collection will either cover more properties per round-trip in a standard collection vehicle, or will use a smaller collection vehicle with lower fuel-consumption. Whether it's more or less efficient will also depend on things like how far the vehicle has to travel to the disposal point, and what is done with the material (is it digested for energy, or is the energy wasted in the creation of low-grade compost?).

It is pointless generalizing about this. It is too complex and variable. It is for this sort of reason that we have that thing called the price mechanism. It provides a condensed version of the necessary information, and allows decentralized decision-making appropriate to the circumstances. You need appropriate, well-designed mechanisms to internalize the externalities (one mechanism per externality), to ensure that the environmental costs are included within this information, but having done that, the rest should be left to the people best-placed to make the judgment in the circumstances.

The best thing we could do with WRAP is shut it down.

[jd]

bgp's response sounds pretty logical but, alas, the first paragraph is not.

A fleet of waste vehicles is a substantial investment for a local council, and many vehicles can carry only one type of waste (i.e. landfill or recyclable) at a time. If you can't mix waste types, you can put food in the landfill on week one, but you can't put it on the same truck that's picking up recyclables on week two. Answer ? Second fleet of trucks. Joined-up thinking, huh?

[bgp]

jd, It seemed to me that WRAP's advice, as it stood before this revision, already provided for separate collection of food waste, and therefore separate vehicles. The change is not the addition of collection of food waste, but its collection once a week rather than once a fortnight. It is not clear to me that this requires investment in a whole new fleet of trucks. It will result in increased vehicle movements, but not an increase in emissions of 50% (which is why I said "not exactly", rather than "not at all"). If the food-waste collection-vehicles covered eight streets before returning to the disposal point, they will now cover (say) sixteen. These numbers obviously aren't accurate, and it may not be pro rata because of marginal changes in people's behaviour, but hopefully you get the point. Less waste in each bin = more houses covered in one round-trip. The impact on emissions is marginal and complex, not a simple calculation as the Bishop implied and you seem still to believe.

I yield to no one in my admiration for the Bishop. And I am not defending the overall approach to waste policy, or disagreeing with his criticisms of it. If you want to know what I think of waste policy generally, have a look at this:

http://www.summerleaze.co.uk/~bruno/consultations/waste_consult_response.pdf

Not exactly complimentary, huh?

This was just a technical point. It serves to illustrate the "meta-point" - don't fall into the same trap of underestimating the complexity and diversity of local circumstances that people like WRAP fall into. Are you arguing that it really is as simple as implied?