Was the film WALL-E prophetic?

Recent news reports from a number of countries about the dire straits in which the recycling industry finds itself have got me thinking. Perhaps the movie ‘Wall-E‘ wasn’t so much fantasy as prophecy . . .

In Britain, for example:

Taxpayers are facing a multi-million-pound bill to store 100,000 tons of waste paper and cardboard as the British recycling industry plunges into crisis.

Rubbish carefully sorted by householders is piling up in vast warehouses as the market for waste paper collapses, and experts have warned that the mountain of garbage could double in the next three months.

Waste paper is now virtually unsellable, so the private firms contracted to deal with household rubbish have been forced to put it into storage, incurring huge bills.

Some companies have begun to claw back the cost from local authorities, prompting fears of hikes in council tax bills and raising the question of whether the ‘kerbside’ recycling, championed by environmentalists across the country, is economically viable.

Last night Steve Bell, of Recycling UK, revealed that none of Britain’s 80 paper mills is now accepting new stock – and warned that the situation is not expected to fully recover until 2010.

Mr Bell said: ‘I would imagine that there are about 100,000 tons of local authority waste still sitting in warehouses, but that could double by March. Local authorities need a rigid system to cope with the amount of waste paper produced.’

Another concern is that if paper is stored for longer than three months it will rot and attract vermin, rendering it worthless. It then has to be incinerated or sent to landfill.

Hundreds of councils pay private firms a fixed rate to either collect waste direct from kerbsides or from depots.

These firms then sell it on to paper mills, which convert it into usable paper, envelopes and newsprint, which is used to make newspapers and tissues. But with demand plummeting, due largely to markets drying up in China, contractors are becoming increasingly desperate.

The price of mixed paper and cardboard waste has dropped from about £70 a ton to £10 in the past six weeks. And the cost of storage means some private firms are charging councils an extra £20 for every ton of paper and cardboard collected.

That means the paper mountain could have already cost taxpayers about £2million – and that figure could double in the next three months as the pile grows from 100,000 to 200,000 tons at a rate of 8,300 tons a week.

While demand for other materials such as plastic and glass has also reduced, it has not collapsed to the same extent as that for paper.

Dave Davis, owner of Oswestry Waste Paper, said: ‘The situation has changed with the pound being so weak. Paper and cardboard are the hardest to shift and in Shropshire we have been stockpiling since October.

‘Contractors in at least five different areas of the country are charging £20 more a ton to collect paper.’

He said the extra waste produced over Christmas had significantly added to the problem.

. . .

Over the past five years, contractors have benefited from a European Union requirement to slash landfill by 50 per cent by 2013.

Councils are fined £32 per ton if they send materials that could be recycled to landfill sites. This forced councils to boost recycling efforts to meet their targets.

In turn, local authorities imposed strict rules on householders already struggling to keep waste to a minimum in the period between fortnightly bin collections. In some areas of the country, residents face fines of up to £200 if they ‘contaminate’ recycling containers with the wrong type of rubbish.

Typically, waste paper is collected and taken by a contractor to be bundled into bales before it is sold on to paper mills.

Before the market crashed, more than half of the ten million tons of recyclable household waste produced each year was sold to China, where steel cans, plastic, glass, paper and cardboard are processed and used to build homes, cars and electrical goods.

But the economic crisis has led to a plunge in demand from China for British raw materials.

The rest of Europe relies less on landfill dumping sites than Britain, so the problems there aren’t quite as bad: but they’re mounting, nevertheless. The US has its own problems, particularly several of our largest cities. New York, for example, suffered a major public embarrassment in 1987 with the Mobro 4000 incident.

The problem seems to me to be threefold.

1. Environmental concerns (which are quite legitimate) have led to a demand to recycle as much waste as possible. This, in turn, has led to requirements for households and businesses to sort their garbage into various types of waste, so that recycling can be accomplished more efficiently. However, all of this costs money. It’s great in times of prosperity, when the cost can be absorbed: but in hard times, it’s another story. I guess it’s a question of ‘effluent’ versus ‘affluent’ – to avoid the first, you’ve got to be the second!

It’s also true that recycling is hard to justify economically, rather than ideologically. As John Tierney pointed out in 1996:

A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side. This doesn’t seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills, the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule addition to the nation’s 150,000 square miles of parkland.

2. Because so many of the products we buy have to be transported across oceans and over long distances, they have to be packaged securely. All that packaging means that the ‘global economy’ has contributed significantly to the ‘global waste’ problem. You can’t have the first option without the second, which goes with it.

3. Because industry has become globalized, there’s no longer a domestic market for most of the waste we produce. If the major paper manufacturers, for example, have all set up plants in China (because that’s where much of the packaging material, boxes, etc. are needed, to contain products as they come off the assembly lines), the raw material for their paper has to be sent there to be used. If it costs too much to send it there, or if demand decreases so that they don’t consume as much as they used to, we’re left with a mountain of waste that we can’t dispose of ourselves.

There’s theoretically no reason why a country such as the USA couldn’t recycle all its paper waste itself, producing more paper, packaging material, etc.: but since our manufacturing base has largely shifted overseas, there simply aren’t enough domestic consumers to justify making all that material here. There’d be no local market for it. It’d cost too much to make boxes and packaging here, ship them to China to be filled with goods, then ship them back here. If more goods were manufactured here, it’d be a different story, but then we’d have to pay more for the products we buy, because US workers can’t live on the wages paid by Chinese factories.

So the global trash problem is an inevitable consequence of the global economy – something to which all national leaders appear committed. What was that about the ‘law of unintended consequences‘ again?

Peter