Rubbish charging given the go-ahead:

Councils in England are to be given the power to introduce pilot schemes to charge households according to the amount of rubbish they throw away.

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m pleased that people are thinking seriously about waste at last, but I’m not sure that charging for unrecycled waste is, on its own, a solution. Let me explain why.

For years now, local authorities have been caught between two hard places. The government has reduced central funding and told the councils to raise the money they need with Council Tax. If their taxes are high, that’s their own fault, and nothing to do with the government. The government saves money and blames the councillors in high-spending authorities for being wasteful.

Recycling schemes cost money, of course, but the councils are trapped there too: the councils themselves are charged for every tonne of waste they send to landfill. So they need to recycle as much as possible to save on this cost. But setting up and managing the recycling costs money too. Councils might want to offer (for example) kerbside plastic recycling, but then find that they can only do so at a loss. They’re doing the right thing, environmentally and morally and in the eyes of the government, but they’re making a loss on it and will have to pay for that from Council Taxes. So some other service, like a library or something generally seen as “less important” than recycling, will get cut instead.

And throughout it all, the government smugly declares that these problems are not of its making, because every high-spending council has only itself to blame.

Right, rant out of the way. Here’s what really bothers me about this idea.

The Tories criticise the scheme saying it will encourage fly-tipping. It might, but I don’t think that’s the biggest problem. More likely is widespread difficulty for people to actually obey the requirements laid upon them to recycle.

Why might it be difficult? Because effective recycling needs physical space.

I’ve said before that recycling is all about storage. You have waste stuff, and it has to be put somewhere. In the past, people just threw it in the dustbin. Now, they need to throw it into one of four or five dustbins. But kitchens in many thousands of houses and flats don’t have enough space for that many bins.

Larger households will find room. Keen green-minded recyclers will make room. But thousands of people, especially those in smaller properties, flats, or rented accommodation, will have trouble finding the space they need to store the waste that they can’t immediately get rid of. People in these circumstances will find it hard to follow waste regulations, because they don’t have the physical space to store their waste and will incur costs if they throw them in their standard wheelie bin.

I can think of two possible solutions, or at least methods of making life easier for these people.

One is widespread use of community bins. A bit like the local recycling centres you see in most towns, but on a much wider scale. There will need to be one on every street, and it will need to be bigger and accept more kinds of waste than the existing ones. There would no doubt be a lot of opposition to something like this, but I suspect most people would prefer it to paying more taxes.

Another option - and this is the one I’d prefer and hope to see come about - is a massive increase in the use of recyclable packaging by food manufacturers and retailers.

When people discover they are being charged by their council for disposal of the little plastic trays that their ham slices sit in, pressure will increase on the supermarkets to make sure those little trays can be recycled.

With any luck, we’ll see bio-degradable packaging taking over. Those with gardens could chuck packaging into their compost bins; those without would be able to throw it on communal compost piles in their nearest park or open space.

I’m not opposed to recycling; I’m very much in favour of it. I want to see it encouraged. But I think the basic, practical problem of storing waste before it is collected is just as important to recyclers as the issue of preventing it going to landfill.