On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 08:59:02 +0100, "Neil Jones"
wrote:


Doubt it, can you find anything on the web that backs this up?

cheers,
Pete.

I'm pretty sure it was this article:-

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/thi...p?story=314732

which was actually from 2002, not last year as I had thought. But I'm
not going to pay The Independent to reread an article I originally read
in a paper I paid for, so I can't post the actual quote.

Here it is:

-----

I'm an 11 bag man myself...

and, frankly, that's rubbish. Simon O'Hagan is shocked to discover
just how much one man, his wife, two children and a cat can throw out

14 July 2002

I'm not proud of the fact that in only one week my family managed to
accumulate no fewer than 11 bags of rubbish – so many that the wheelie
bin was full to overflowing and the rest of them had to be sidestepped
on the way to our front door. And the three black bags' and eight
swing-bin liners' worth of refuse – all of it produced by just two
adults, two children and one cat – didn't include the stuff we put in
our recycling box. Disgraceful.

Shame is one thing. It would be quite another to have to pay £10 a
week, £500 a year, for the removal of this quantity of stuff. For that
is what the more profligate among us were threatened with last week in
a proposal to charge for the removal of excess amounts of rubbish.
What constitutes excess, you might ask. Well, anything over two black
bags per week per household, suggests the Performance and Innovation
Unit, which carried out the research for the Government. Every
additional bag would cost £1. Yikes! We O'Hagans, along with millions
of other people, are going to have to change our ways.

The Government has since distanced itself from the scheme. It won't
happen, says Gordon Brown. But it concentrated people's minds, and
left the question: how do we reduce the amount of rubbish we create?
The obvious answer is to acquire less stuff in the first place. But
assuming that people need everything that comes into their homes, how
does one minimise the amount that ends up contributing to the problem
of Britain's rapidly expanding refuse tips and landfill sites?

Rubbish is one of those areas where we Britons lag hopelessly behind
our Continental neighbours. We produce far more – 400kg per person
annually compared with, for example, 300kg in France, and it's growing
by 3 per cent a year.

We also recycle far less – a pathetic 11 per cent compared with, for
example, 52 per cent in Switzerland. The Germans recycle 48 per cent
of their rubbish, the Dutch 46 per cent, and the Norwegians 40 per
cent. All these countries, and many others, have higher targets still
for recycling. And while we might think of America as a shrine to the
consumer, we should also recognise that it recycles a commendable 31.5
per cent of what it chucks away.

Somewhat lost amid last week's warning of financial penalties was the
parallel recommendation that the policy would only work alongside a
much improved recycling collection service. At the moment only half of
British households are offered any kind of recycling service – and
what's more there's a limit to what can go into a recycling bin. Into
ours go glass bottles, newspapers and tins (labels removed), but
there's no provision for plastic containers or cardboard which, in
theory, are also recyclable. Food packaging remains a blight on the
environment, but in a society where the rise of the single-occupancy
household means ever more demand for convenience food, that's not a
problem that is going to go away. No wonder binmen are due to go on
strike.

I phoned our local authority – Brent – to find out what more I could
do. It recommended one of their compost bins, on special offer at £5.
But demand was outstripping supply, and I would have to wait at least
twice the 35-day delivery period that it said on the form.

There is still only a fraction of British households that uses compost
bins, and clearly they have no role to play if you don't have a
garden. But we do, and a compost bin would account for leftover food
and a lot of cardboard. Add that to all the other recyclable materials
and I could see how Friends of the Earth estimates that up to 80 per
cent of what we throw away could be recycled.

"This figure is based on a higher provision for home collections,"
Martin Williams, an FoE parliamentary campaigner, told me. "It's no
good if people have to drive to recycling centres, thereby cancelling
out the environmental benefits." The FoE is running a "doorstep
recycling campaign", with the support of 270 MPs. In agreeing that the
Government's proposals are a good idea only if there is a recycling
service to every home, Greenpeace warns that without one, "it could
become a fly-tipper's charter".

In defence of my family's recent rubbish record, I'd like to point out
that one bag had a couple of discarded pillows in it, and another
comprised an empty cardboard box. And I'm sure I could reduce the
number further by packing our rubbish more neatly. But that's not
really good enough, is it?

-----

Although it doesn't mention collected glass being landfilled it's
mostly okay, but could be a lot better.

I don't doubt that some collected glass was landfilled in the past
when the facilites for dealing with it weren't in place, but nowadays
I would have thought that it was a tiny minority of collected material
if at all.

cheers,
Pete.