Sunday, 16th November 2008

The Oxford Times this week reports on the latest extension to the city’s recycling plans. The proposal is to add food waste to the newspapers, tins, plastics and garden waste that are already collected. The problem is that the council just doesn’t have the money to do a weekly collection and so is saying that it will only collect every fortnight. What kind of smells that might lead to will only become clear with the passage of time. Rats, at least, may be happy with fortnightly collections.

But at the risk of being accused of “banging on” about “Europe” this article must point out that these issues are all decided by our real government in Brussels. The EU’s Landfill Directive of 1999 lays down strict targets for the amount of waste that Britain needs to recycle. For Oxfordshire, the amount of waste going into landfill must be reduced by 60% over the next 13 years. So desperate is the drive to find more to recycle that even food waste must now be collected.

But EU legislation often just simply drops into the country with no prior planning to take account of its effects. In this case, the money to finance it. Councils simply don’t have the money : Oxford’s councillor in charge of waste collection, John Tanner, estimates that a weekly collection would cost an extra £600,000.

Still, recycling is popular among many people and it could be that its one of those policies that an independent UK would decide to continue, although perhaps modified to take into account national and local variations. UKIP’s environmental policy says that household waste could be collected, sorted and processed using a flexible system of licensed contractors at much less cost to the householder or taxpayer than the current system. A more flexible system would provide cost effective methods for dealing with waste in the most appropriate ways. In some circumstances, householders might even receive payment for their rubbish once sorted appropriately.

UKIP says that much more waste can be and should be recycled but it also recognises that recycling itself has an environmental cost, and some waste will be best used to generate heat and power. For other suitable waste, landfill is still the best environmental option, particularly with associated methane recovery and electricity generation. Widespread closure of landfill sites in the UK has been driven by EU policies designed originally for Holland and Belgium.

With the cost of Britain’s EU membership already touching £14billion per year (and some argue that the figure could be as high as £50billion when indirect effects are taken into account) an independent Britain would have plenty of money to play with if it decided to have those weekly collections. Not only that, but there would be the prospect of more local decision-making on what people want to do. Another of UKIP’s policies, designed specifically to take powers AWAY from politicians and to make sure that they do what WE want and not what THEY want, is to enable local and national referenda on issues of concern to people. So maybe Oxford could decide that it would like to continue with the present aim to increase the rate of recycling, and also decide whether it wanted to landfill some of the waste or to incinerate it (a topical issue in Wantage where there are protests against plans for an incinerator).

There would be disagreements on policy even in a Britain outside the European Union but at least we would have the cash to finance those waste collections and the possibility of local control by local people. What a breath of fresh air that would be after the top-down, centralist measures taken by our present government in Brussels.

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