We’ve got an attitude problem:
why attitudes towards recycling need to change

Catherine Roberts examines why prehistoric attitudes towards recycling demolished the CPRE’s 2008 bottle deposit campaign. Could Brighton & Hove be key to reigniting the debate over reintroducing a bottle deposit system?

Waste management: two words that are guaranteed to make 90 per cent of the English population’s eyes glaze over.

How about recycling? Discuss recycling and you’ll get a slightly perkier response, particularly from residents in Brighton & Hove, who like to flex their green muscles from time to time.
v Perhaps it’s the dull language used that turns people off: the subject of waste management seems to collect of the least attractive words in the English language: waste; compost; landfill; rubbish; disposal. Whatever the reason, local waste management rarely receives the attention it warrants.

Local councils need help: they have been struggling to meet European Union recycling targets since a 1999 crackdown instructed that the amount of biodegradable waste dumped at UK landfill sites must be cut by two-thirds by 2020.

Right now the problem isn’t that waste management hasn’t changed there has definitely been a growing emphasis on recycling over dumping waste into tips it’s just that progress is unbearably slow, particularly when our evolving recycling habits are compared to our Continental cousins.v

Encouragingly, recycling in Brighton & Hove is on the rise, with recycling rates doubling to 28 per cent between 2004 and 2009. But the local landfill site is full: there is only so much rubbish you can dump into a hole in the ground, after all.

The city council’s waste strategy will have to plough on regardless since it wants to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill from 50 per cent to two per cent in a mere ten years.

But how?

Stop the drop

In 2008 the charity Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) started their Stop the Drop campaign. Still ongoing, it calls for amongst other things a bottle deposit scheme to be reintroduced in England.

The plan is a close cousin to the bottle deposit schemes that used to exist before they cannonballed out of fashion in the 1970s. Drinks containers would have a 15p deposit on 500ml bottles; 30p for larger bottles. The deposit would then be refunded to consumers when they returned the container to a retailer or other facility.

The basic principle is that the polluter pays: those who want to recycle will be rewarded by getting their money back, while those who don’t will lose their deposit. Simple. The CPRE also predict potential net savings of a not unsubstantial £1.2 billion a year.

Change your attitude

It is no good implementing a scheme if local and national attitudes towards recycling are poor. Labour might’ve brought recycling to our doorsteps in the 1990s but the government also had a bad habit of whipping out draconian punishments for those who broke minor rules.

As if to fan the flames, Brighton & Hove Council’s fines became increasingly ridiculous. The Argus was full of gleeful headlines: “Recycler blasts fine as rubbish!” “A fine mess!” “Recycling box row ends up in court!”

A winning combination of bad press and bad management started our rebooted recycling system on such a wrong footing that it never really straightened itself out.

Coalition

In 2010 the Coalition government promised to travel the slightly less severe route: instead of punishing those who didn’t recycle, it started rewarding those who did. The Lib-Con manifesto also promised to “work towards a ‘zero waste’ economy, encourage councils to pay people to recycle, and work to reduce littering”.

It sounded suspiciously like the Coalition was encouraging the development of a bottle deposit system. After all, incentive-led schemes were already proven to be successful in other countries.

Case study: Germany

Robert Bamber is a Brighton ex-pat who lives near Hanover, Germany. Having had one foot in England and one foot in Germany for most of his adult life, he’s witnessed Brighton & Hove’s recycling efforts improving and he’s seen how quickly it’s possible to progress when you have a proactive government who really don’t want to be slapped with a hefty fine for missing those ambitious EU targets.

In 2003 Chancellor Andrea Merkel’s government introduced a bottle deposit scheme in Germany that barely caused a splash in the waters. Back home, reactions to the CPRE’s campaign for a national bottle deposit scheme was met in turns with protest and a traditional apathetic shrug.

Was the response similar in Germany?

Robert laughs. “No! It’s different here.” He shrugs. “You have to get rid of rubbish somehow so why not recycle it?”

He adds that bin-liners cost over one Euro each, whereas colour-coded sacks for recyclables are free.

Germany’s recovery of beverage containers went from 62 per cent when introduced to 71 per cent in less than five years and it looks to increase further.

Eventually it will catch up with the giants of green, Canada, where collecting bottles for deposits is a bit of a national hobby. And why not, when it hits an average of 95 per cent return rates?

Back home

The Brighton & Hove Council waste strategy says: “Countries with the lowest rates of waste generation generally have measures in place at a national level, for example, requiring manufacturers to put returnable deposits on plastic and glass bottles.

“At present the council’s powers to reduce the amount of waste are limited to encouraging customers to change their behaviour.”

Squinting between the lines sort of like looking at a Magic Eye picture you can decipher exactly what they’re saying: we have budget constraints; there’s not enough money; oh, and thanks for the lack of support, Coalition.

Back in 2009, Defra ended up rejecting the CPRE’s campaign because the costs compared to existing recycling facilities were considered too high. The decision revealed a government with a strange short-sightedness. Ministers seemed to brush aside the CPRE’s argument that the bottle deposit system would reduce costs to the public sector by £160 million a year without even examining it and without suggesting any viable alternatives.

Time to reignite the debate

If any city council was to put pressure on the Government to increase rates of recycling through a bottle deposit scheme, it would be Brighton & Hove. The city boasts the only Green council in the UK and has their own MP Caroline Lucas in Parliament.

What does the Green Party think about the future of the bottle deposit system campaign?

[This article is in the process of being edited]

Photo courtesy of Mandy