Does recycling reduce the problem of waste disposal?
Depending on where you live most of your rubbish is either incinerated or (more likely) landfilled neither of which are exactly good for the environment. The best council in the UK recycle 60% of household rubbish but the average is about 35%. About 12% of UK household rubbish is now incinerated. When rubbish rots in a landfill it produces methane which is 20 times worse than carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming. When rubbish is incinerated at least a bit of electricity is generated but both landfill and incineration are a waste of all the natural resources and energy that went into making the stuff that we throw away. Also new sites for landfills are very hard to find – would you want to live near one?! And in any case by law we have the significantly reduce the amount of rubbish landfilled over the next ten years. In order to put councils off landfilling the government taxes landfill by £40 a tonne and this will go up by £8 a tonne next year and the year after so councils
