A Zero Waste Economy To Save Money Is Entirely Mad

No, no, entirely, wholly, fruit loop, mad

It’s entirely possible to think that waste minimisation is a good idea. It’s also possible to think that waste minimisation is insane. The difference is in what definition of the word “waste” we’re using here. If by waste we mean things we save money by using instead of not using then it’s great. If by waste we mean just detritus then it’s insane.

Modern green politics has - to be very polite about it indeed - got itself confused in this definitional battle. Which is why we get nonsense like this being propounded as potential political policy:

A Labour government would aim for a zero-waste economy by 2050, the shadow environment secretary has said.

Steve Reed said the measure would save billions of pounds and also protect the environment from mining and other negative actions. He was speaking at the Restitch conference in Coventry, held by the thinktank Create Streets.

Labour is finalising its agenda for green renewal and Reed indicated a zero-waste economy would be part of this.

This would mean the amount of waste going to landfill would be drastically reduced and valuable raw materials including plastic, glass and minerals reused, which would save money for businesses who would not have to buy, import or create raw materials.

The horror here does depend upon that definition of waste. Or, if we want to delve deeper, the definition of resource that is being saved.

The idea of re-use doesn’t frighten me in the least. I’ve a habit of haunting second hand and charity clothes shops - as people who have seen the way I dress have noted. I’m also entirely in favour of recycling - as anyone who has recycled scrap bits of Soviet nuclear power stations into car wheels should be. And yes, I have done that too.

But I do, absolutely, insist upon the difference between reducing waste as in repurposing something that has value and waste as in but, but, we can’t allow anything to go to landfill. Too much of the modern world equates the two and this is simply something that isn’t true.

In that first sense, a zero waste society is an excellent thing. We used to have one too. Back in the days of the rag and bone man nothing at all from household waste that was worth anything went to waste. The rags got turned into paper, the bones into fertiliser. It’s possible perhaps to go a bit too far as with Chinese nightsoil collection methods - the reason we don’t want to put human shit on the fields is because that returns human parasites to the human food chain - but the base idea is sound. If there’s value there then why leave that value to rot, or why throw that value into the hole in the ground that is landfill? The reason we don’t do the rag and bone man now is that the human labour of the man is worth more than the rags and bones.

But to then go on to say that nothing should be thrown into landfill is to get that definition of value wrong.

This requires a little step back. So, define economic resources. Heck, define resources. The traditional economic one is land, labour, capital. In more modern terms folk seem to think they mean physical resources - minerals, glass, plastics and so on. The truth is that anything that is scarce is an economic resource.

So, do we have an infinite supply of capital? Labour? Land? Glass? Copper, oil and so on? Nope. They might be very large, those potential supplies, and you’ll normally find me arguing that over time most of them are, by any human measure, roughly infinite. But at any one time they are all scarce.

OK, that means that we then need to balance our resource use. We do not want to use more of one scarce resource than is worth using to save some amount of saving some other resource. We desire, that is, to save - or be economical with - all resources, not just the one at any one time. So, we require the optimal reduction in resource use across many different resources.

Just as an example - and while I have views on this I am not predicting the outcome here - think of home sorting of recycling. Some estimates have this at 30 minutes per household per week, the time cost to households of doing this sorting. If we add in washing out the peanut butter jar then we’ve some water usage, possibly hot water and so on. Some resource use - assuming that we include human labour as a scarce economic resource, which of course we must.

OK. So, we’ve two possible models here. One is homes sort into 17 bins or whatever the latest demand is. Or, alternatively, we have big factories where all unsorted rubbish goes to. To be mechanically sorted. Right - so our choice between the two should be based upon total resource use. But when we make those comparisons we do not include that household time. 25 million households, 30 minutes a week, 450 million hours a year. At, what, minimum wage? £10 an hour (just to keep my maths simple) is £4.5 billion a year. That household sorting is cheaper - sorry, less resource using - than the factory model is it?

And that little slip - cheaper, less resource using - is not really a slip. For we are in a market economic system. Resources have prices attached to them. So, we can measure resource use - imperfectly to be sure but usefully - by the price of different ways of doing things. Cool!

At which point, recycling everything, moving to a zero waste economy, is more expensive than the current system. Therefore it uses more resources. We know this because we always do have to provide a subsidy to these recycling systems. None of them do make a profit. Or, rather, when they do make a profit we don’t even call them recycling, we call them scrap processing.

Which all does lead us to a very interesting even if countercultural conclusion. The usual support for recycling is taken to be an anti-price, anti-market, even anti-capitalist idea. Supported by the usual soap dodging hippies. But, as actually happens out in the real world, recycling is one of those things that should be - even if it isn’t - entirely dominated by the price system and markets. Even, dread thought, capitalism. We should only recycle those things we can make a profit by recycling. Because that’s now prices inform us about which systems actually save resources.

And ain’t that cute? The usual example of why we shouldn’t use prices and markets only works if we do?

Oh, and the new Labour policy? “ I’ve seen analysis that shows it adds a £70bn boost to the economy.” That’s £70 billion in extra costs in fact - £70 billion reasons we shouldn’t do it.