Going low waste at home - part 3

Of course all the changes I've described in my last few postings have

taken time, effort and masses of motivation. And, yes, I know, we don’t have children. But the point is that it is possible to achieve dramatic reductions in the amount of waste we create. People need help, they need information, they need incentives and occasionally they need rules.

For example, I think the only way we’re going to be able to introduce a pay as you throw scheme in an inner city borough like Camden is by copying cities in Belgium and Switzerland. Over there the local council sells colour-coded bin bags to local shops at different prices. The cost of rubbish and recycling collection is then taken out of local taxes and put into the price of the bags. Black – for general waste – is the most expensive. Recycling bags are cheaper with bags for the most valuable recycling cheapest of all. Nothing is picked up unless it’s in a colour-coded bag.

This neatly gets round the biggest problem with pay as you throw in Camden – the difficulty of associating a household with a particular bin. And it provides incentives for people to produce less waste and recycle more. It’s a big change, and for the moment I’m being told by those in power that it’s too big a change. I think we need to be more adventurous. In the words of John F Kennedy: “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.”