We have to remember why we recycle. Recycling is only a 'good thing' if it saves either natural resources (such as trees) and/or energy. If it achieves neither of these things it is dishonest and we should simply dispose of the material in an energy-from-waste plant.

Councils collecting co-mingled recyclables are creating very poor quality materials for the recycling industry. Of course Ayelsford Newsprint is profit making, they are in the business of making high quality Newsprint that they can sell. They can't make it from the rubbish supplied by poor quality co-mingled schemes. It is not their job to process rubbish, it is the Council's job to organise its recycling scheme to maximise its value for the environment - and not simply to meet its targets at minimum cost.

Bill Swan, London, UK

Before Bournemouth Borough Council started collecting recycled rubbish from each house in September 06, a number of recycle centres had been in operation for over five years, at those centres all material was seperated into its own bin, Glass (white) in one section, Red in another and Clear in yet another, Plastic all in one bin, Cans in another bin, Papers in one bin & Cardboard in yet another. Now what happens it is all put into one bin, when it is emptied on collection day, you can hear the bottles being broken so how can it be sorted out into properly recycled materials is any one's guess. Most householders in this area used to recycle at the sites set up but now the method of recycling has been blown away. Who is going to get the blame because the council have made a right mess of the collection. Why the householder of course. Government should sort out this awfull mess that the councils have got themsevles into over the recycling conumdrum, and the sooner the better.

G. Fowler, Bournemouth, UK

The perception seems less than positive about where we are, and who is leading us there in this regard. I wonder why? Oh...

“...councils... just want to get it off their hands.” Where, it is claimed (why don't we KNOW?) '...these depots are routinely run at overcapacity because of the pressure to hit government targets..'

Don't worry chaps, our confidence, or lack of, is irrelevant. We'll simply get another multi-million £ campaign to work for free and the chance of avoiding a fine, to serve up stuff that can't be handled but at least meets a target.

Before anything else we need proper systems in place that addresses what goes to waste from point of manufacture, through to disposal. But almost everything seems to have been dumped on the poor consumer in the middle to work out for themselves, and/or work under threat to resolve the mess those who have had decades to sort it all out have made, or hiring legions of high £ consultants to spin.

What 'work' is WRAP doing?

Peter 'Junkkdotcom' Martin, Ross on Wye, UK

the UK is capable of recycling virtually all our waste. There is no concerted clear vision or leadership from central govt.
therfore all we have done are 'bits and pieces', left it to comercial interests, who will pick a profitable area and do it well. However, there is a bigger picture requiring joined up thinking so that each local, regional authority and national govt knows what is required, then make sure facilities are built in the correct areas to remove what we use. There are a host of excellent ways of dealing with waste, all have been running for years in Europe. We use few of them, even incineration can be useful in certain cases [stick the flue gasses underground, use heat generated for local homes[Denmark does it well.]
Uk organisation of these matters is shambolic presently, and until we take a serious grip of them we will continue to threaten people with fines and even imprisonment for their failure to conform, what embarrassing lunacy this is

David Logan, Peterhead, uk

There are two main problems concerning recycling:
1. The process leads to an increase in entropy for the environment.
2. The concentration of particular material e.g. plastics leads to an increase in toxic potential.

Most economies are driven by expansion and exploitation: essentially of raw materials and people - recyling only helps support the rate of exploitation.

A measure of civilisation is said to be the distance man puts between himself and his rubbish.

Martin Roberts, London,

This article is irresponsible, superficial and plain wrong. Mixed recycling collections are designed to make things easier for residents, not the reprocessors who's bleatings are motivated by profit. Your major fact is that 9,000 tonnes are being landfilled from a plant that processes about 500,000 tonnes per annum. Whilst we would all prefer that there were no losses, and everything sent to the plant could be recycled, it's hardly the sort of council perpetrated environmental swindle that the article suggests. Councils, and more importantly their residents, work really hard to recycle and divert waste from disposal and this sort of sloppy journalism just erodes public confidence for no good reason.

Oliver, Winchester, UK

The problem here seems to be that the aims of recycling cannot be put into practice easily. The objectives are good but the results are now coming to light.
My Company (Genesyst) can take the crude recycled paper (tainted as stated) and separate it from the pollutants allowing us to convert it to the Biofuel Ethanol. We can readily turn this waste (or any biomass in waste) to fuel Ethanol at a competitive capital cost, and produce enough Ethanol to produce an income which can be returned back to the Councils enabling them to give real Council Tax Reductions to the Public. All this can be done in an environmentally acceptable and cost effective manner.
We are near to finalising a project in the North West which will take this style of waste and convert it to Ethanol.
For too long treating waste has been a cost to the Public, it need not be. Converting waste to the fuel Ethanol will produce an income which can be given back to the hard pressed Public as Council Tax Reductions.

Peter Hurrell, High Wycombe, UK

Incineration destroys potentially valuable, non-renewable resources, adding cabon to the environment, regardless of whether or not it's clean. It's no substitute for recycling.

RogerH, Bath,

We separate our recycling but it's collected altogether. It would be no more difficult to collect it separately for most people but some live in litlle places with no space. When we take ours to the recycling centre its always overflowing so lots of people really do want to separate and know it can be recycled properly.

caroline, oxford,

Westminster City Council provides separate recycling bins for paper, glass, plastic and tin cans prompting our household to buy and use separate bins in the home. It was frustrating to turn up one day with my carefully separated waste at the same time as the council collection lorry and be cheerfully told not to worry about putting it all in the separate bins as it all went in the back of the lorry anyway and so I should just toss my bags in the back with the rest. Why bother providing separate bins only to muddle it all up again?

Mark, London,

The Public don't get it right - fines.
Local Government get it wrong - that's OK.
Where's the Lady of Justice under New Labour's ''democracy''?

K. Urban, London, UK

We have a minister for recycling who could not be bothered to recycle and a respect tzar who gets drunk and swears a lot! I need to find a way out of the system.

Terry, Radstock, England

I am a great supporter of recycling but am fed up with half baked and inconsistent policies that vary greatly from council to council. Why are we approaching a national problem in a haphazard manner that is enabling councils to increase their recycling figures on paper but then failing in the real objective. This will do wonders for people who are already angry with the problems of fortnightly collections and the prospect of David Milliband's slop buckets.

Jane, Sutton,

I am not even vaguely convinced by the recycling and global heating lobbies which are effectively self-perpetuating and self-serving industries that also facilitate the local and national authorities' desire to control and tax UK citizens. Personally I do not recycle anything at all. If the authorities want to recycle then that is fine by me, but do not expect me or my family to have anything to do with it.

Jon van Allen, Birmingham,

The Sunday Tines article is very valis. If you refer to www.letsrecycle.com one can see, that whist recycling is the way forward and gaining strength: there are issues where to divert volumes away from landfill, the environment and resources are wastes. Green Fibs. These are:

Incinerator are safe and green: They are not, heard of PM2.5s, Innfant Mortality in downwind wards. Dr Dick van Steenis, Michael Ryan. Smaller plasma gasifiers, MBT/AD and Autoclaving are much better.

Mixed Recycling: Properly kerbside separated recycleables produce high quality materials for industry such as newsprint and glass. Together they a are a nightmare. If glass is collected separately this makes a huge difference. The second thing is the quality of separating technology in Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs). Some are very good like NEWS in Norfolk with V screen and plastic grades separation technology; others are very poor. The poor MRFs need to improve with quality control, and do their job!

Rob Whittle, Norwich, UK

Is anybody surprised ! I'm certainly not. I remember listening to a news report on Irish radio RTE where it was revealed that one council was collecting recycled rubbish from householders every day. Only on one day was the collection being recycled, every other day the recycled plastic paper and glass was tipped into the landfill site. The whole recycling business is a farce and a sop to all these "Greenies"

Phil de Buquet, Newport, England

This says it all,
"Aylesford Newsprint is among a number of companies supporting a Campaign for Real Recycling, which is urging councils to sort the waste during kerbside collections or to request householders to separate their own waste."

Presumably Aylesford Newsprint is a profit making business,but it seems to want householders to work free for them.The word "request" here is a euphemism for threaten,councils see only one way of achieving compliance,fines.Why not offer financial inducements to the poor long suffering council tax payers,who after all,have already paid for this service?

Peter B, Manchester, Lancashire

we should all pull together and contribute to the recycling problem, looking first at the company's who use too much packaging, there is no need for the amount used even a toy, I can hardly get at the toy with all the cardboard and plastic ties. The council are giving too many mixed messages and not enough support, I recycle at my local bottle bank etc as I get confused with what can go in what bin/box and the elderly of my neighbours have no interest in washing and sorting out containers. Fines for the company's to pay who abuse packaging is a good starting point. The council needs to get there self in order, they do not seem to know what they are doing , so how are we supposed to know??

K Mayle, Edenfield, Lancashire

its a digrace,and should impose a heavy fine,if whats going on the re-cycled product is true..otherwise what the point in re-cycling/

tony, glasgow,

Until landfilling is made illegal or it is economically non-viable, then household waste will always be viewed as rubbish instead of a valuable resource - whether it be recycled or converted into energy. The UK has made great progress in recent years but it appears that the media is often reluctant to support the call for sustainability or is happy to report dispropotionately when there are faults in the recycling system. I now live in China where in Beijing 90% of household waste goes to landfill and printing on recycled paper is 6 times the cost of virgin paper. The UK should be proud of the improvements it has made in recycling rates in the last 5 years. Also, recycling should be considered the last option after reducing consumption (waste minimisation) and re-use.

Andrew Owen, Shanghai, China

As a first move all the olympic facilities should be built using glass aggregate thus creating a market for the otherwise unmarketable . I have seen my local bottle banks being emptied into one huge container. The public are will its the the councils that are weak.

Jane Knight

Jane Knight, Didcot, UK

Chris White wants the householder to do the sorting but it seems to me that the real point is to get companies to reduce their packaging, councils to give sorting depots achieveable targets and those depots to do their job properly. Admittedly, I do not generate a lot of waste as much of it is composted, fed to my dogs or burnt... but the prospect of having to sort what's left into as many as five different boxes means problems of where to put them and also the feeling that once again the auhtorities are taking another step along the road to a "we-know-what's-best-for-you" dictatorship. On another note, the fact that my council collects boxes fortnightly and not wheelie bins means it took me two months to recycle a batch of magazines as our collectors claimed my boxes were too heavy to lift!

Sandra Halliday, Sidcup, Kent

I live in the Camden borough. When the recycling scheme started a van collected our recycling waste and separated the items. Today, all the recycling goods are dumped into one garbage van - the same as the normal refuse collection van. And yet housholders are being threatened with fines for not adhering to recylcing rules! Whose fooling who?

iuys, london, uk

This is typical of the current situation in the UK. Control the individual, but not the large public organism. It is truly an ill thought out mechanism that needs to be seriously readdressed. The problem is that the people who are and soon will be in power have no interest in changing this, in fact they appear to love the thought of exacerbating the situation.

Andy B, London, UK

There is a common misconception that all 'plastic' is the same. There are hundreds of different polymers. Each has its own properties and is used for a specific purpose. Modern manufacturing processes rely on high purity, uncontaminated raw materials. It is virtually impossible to sort domestic waste plastic to the standards required, consequently the market for recycled plastic is limited to the production of low value, low specification items. A much better alternative is to use waste plastic as a fuel to generate energy, thus replacing a proportion - albeit relatively small - of our conventional energy sources.

John Kelly, Barnstaple, UK

David Miliband just doesn't get it does he! The general public will not take recycling very seriously when, for instance, they learn that the government plans for Stansted airport are to go ahead with a view to encouraging a massive increase in future customer turnover. Their whole approach to this very serious problem is inconsistent and really quite farcical (slop buckets, etc.).

shirley bowen, Blackpool, UK

Congratulations to the Sunday Times for exposing the green myth. Seven years ago I was invited to chair a value-for-money seminar attended by waste managers from Councils all over the country. I opened by inviting everyone to have a moment of honesty and put their hands up if they were sending recycling material to landfill. Half the delegates owned up. That is why I remain a firm advocate of recycling waste honestly through energy recovery. Energy recovery plants have very advanced emissions control equipment and are effectively policed. They conserve fossil fuels. Too many councils are causing people to pay excessive amounts for recycling waste, when much of it goes long distances to landfill where it decomposes and emits greenhouse gases in an uncontrolled manner. Politicians of all parties now also have to emit a load of green hot air to be elected. Sadly hot air merely speeds up climate change. Only the effective implementation of proven technology will save the planet.

David Mayers, Colchester, UK

Switzerland; Does not use Euros. Recycled waste is generally taken to centralized collection bins by the householder. Geneva has a state-of -the-art incinerator which can sort out cans, plastics etc. The heat generated is pumped about 5 miles to help heat a large apt. complex.
Germany; Southern Germany cannot handle its waste problem and excess is shipped to gGeneva for incineration.

A. Webster, Geneva, switzerland

This will always be a problem whilever reporting against the recycling target is measured when waste is collected as opposed to when it is finally disposed of. Councils currently have no serious incentive to ensure that "recycled" waste is in fact recycled.
I wonder whether the much higher recycling rates in some other countries are similarly contaminated, or do they order things better?

Rob Smith, Loughborough,

take out the paper and glass and burn the rest. that incineration solves the energy gap.
simple.

farquhar, southport, uk

All countries have problems with mixed waste, but they have inceneration. The problem in the UK is the lack of incineration for combustable mixed waste such as paper and plastic. This is a result of the "Tree huggers" who object to controlled incineration. So we have the obsurd situation where we allow the uncontrolled combustion of our plastics wastes in third world countries creating Dioxins, HCL and other toxic substances to be emmitted to the global environment. Great job. What we need is more incineration to deal with the mixed waste, better segregation especially at kirb side, and above all a return to deposit based glass beverage containers. In europe they use a lot more glass for soft drinks etc. It is much easier to use a deposit system for glass than to throw it away sort and recycle. Finally, in every sector of the economy with the exception of the retail sector the polluter pays. We should set legal targets to reduce overall packaging, ban plastic bags, and use paper

Andrew Tagg, Halifax, UK

Like many people I applaud any scheme to clean up and improve our environment - but this recyling nightmare is both confusing and misleading. Our local councils are not giving the public enough tools or a system to do the job properley, it is all half-hearted and inadequate. On a holiday last year to the Kingstbridge area of Devon, our holiday home was provided by the local council with some 4 different containers for refuse; a clear plastic bag for aluminium cans and plastic bottles, a paper and cardboard bag, a food bag and a bag for all other stuff. We thought this was the most excellent system and only wish our own council would adopt a similar system. Who would then have to worry (as worry most of us will) in case we are fined in the future. The nation is prepared to do all they can but the authorities MUST lead the way in how they collect. Guess where I'm going for my holiday this year, back to Devon - doing my bit for carbon footprinting (no flying) and recyling!

Janet Fairfax, Fareham, Hampshire

The government want to charge you for waste that can be recycled but there aren't the facilities to do it. No surprises there. Until the country can recycle plastics then any attempt at charging should be fought tooth and nail. Plastics packaging must be the largest volume of throw away waste today.
As for sorting recycling waste we have 70,000 layabouts in prison. Prisons should be turned into sorting plants.

David Thijm, Stourbridge, UK

My work entails travel to, and living for short periods of time in, Austria. The procedure for rubbish collection is similar to UK in general, but specific differences are experienced in terms of recycling.

All packaging material is deposited in a "yellow sack" that is issued free by the council on the basis of one sack per month per household, should additional sacks be required then they may be purchased from the council. Packaging material is exactly that, and includes plastics, plastic bottles, aluminium cans, tins, greaseproof paper etc. The yellow sacks have a drawstring neck to enable opening and closing, and they are collected once per month.

Paper, and cardboard are collected once per month in a specific bin.

Households are encouraged to compost as much waste as possible, and the remainder is collected in specific "other" rubbish bins. The "other" rubbish is collected either once per fortnight, or monthly depending on what collection fee one wishes to pay, so the thr

Jim D, Norwich, UK

I think it illustrates that our "civilisation" relies too much on unneccsary packaging. If we re-ue the intrinsic value of the objects: (bottles, jars, bags) rather than destroying, transporting and reprocessing them then we can avoid all of this ridiculous waste of time and energy. I remember when I was a kid the 10p redemption value on Corona drinks bottles. It meant there was a monetary incentive in preserving the bottle as it was and re-using it as one rather than just th material it was made from. There is a lot of effort being put into recycling but it should be used in a much smarter way. The attitudes of some councils do not help residents with the task in hand. Why have we allowed our society become one which expects us to act in such a lazy manner? It seems to be all about convenience just so we can have more "leisure" time.

Jono Taylor, Bristol, UK

The problem here seems to be one of motivation - once the knowledge is in the public domain that recycled waste is being placed in to landfill the public's low recycling morale takes a further nosedive.

Knowing that we cannot halve our Council tax bill with a fortnightly collection is bad enough; knowing that your local Council is giving the additional burden of recycling as a reason for its fortnightly collection and then entering in to the bad economics of not getting the income from the recycled waste and continuing with the policy of hiding the waste for future generations to deal with is without question a lose - lose situation, at its best unenlightened.

Accountability of all Councils , transparency even , by each Council having to prepare an annual Waste Report would highlight what is happening - it is the lack of knowledge of what is really going on that increases the budding recyclers' blood pressure.

Let's start with bringing back deposits on bottles..

John Huggins, Norwich, Norfolk

The waste from newspaper recycling is regularly dumped on farmland. The regulations say it must be "de-inked" however they dump the blue gray waste from the de-inking process. All those heavy metals in your food. The site I inspected is quite close to North Wales.

I can also confirm that the glass bottles are all mixed.

In the US (California) They have a far better recycling systems where you are paid for waste. Instead of punishment they see the value in it. In this country it is a political process and so has no value.

Neil, Haworth, UK

We used to have one large dustbin lorry a week collect everything, now we have 4 each collecting something different. Even my kids reckon recycling equals more polution. And have you seen the glass collection lorries at the local bottle bank? They pick up each "bell" and empty them all into the same great big trailer. If they do that why on earth do people put green in green, clear in clear etc. The idea is good, the practical reality is a farce

jon bowen, london, uk

What nonsense! Has anybody bothered to analyse the cost (financial and resources) of recycling? The car journeys made to deposit a few newspapers in a container, the water used to clean cans/bottles/plastic containers, the soap used by people to clean up after they have gone through the unpleasant task of sorting through their waste. And then we find (which many of us knew anyway) that much of it is politically motivated claptrap that won't do any good anyway. And what about the energy used to reprocess those materials that are accepted? For many household commodities most of their cost of production is for energy used in processing, not for raw materials.

What about this country's motivation to "improve recycling", which is merely to try to comply with an EU directive which like much of what comes from them is ill considered and inappropriate for many member countries?

There really is an enormous amount of nonsense talke about recycling.

Peter Jones, Oxford,

The problem here seems to be that the aims of recycling cannot be put into practice easily. The objectives are good but the results are now coming to light.
My Company (Genesyst) can take the crude recycled paper (tainted as stated) and separate it from the pollutants allowing us to convert it to the Biofuel Ethanol. We can readily turn this waste (or any biomass in waste) to fuel Ethanol at a competitive capital cost, and produce enough Ethanol to produce an income which can be returned back to the Councils enabling them to give real Council Tax Reductions to the Public. All this can be done in an environmentally acceptable and cost effective manner.
We are near to finalising a project in the North West which will take this style of waste and convert it to Ethanol.
For too long treating waste has been a cost to the Public, it need not be. Converting waste to the fuel Ethanol will produce an income which can be given back to the hard pressed Public as Council Tax Reductions.

Peter Hurrell, High Wycombe, UK

Recycling is just another excuse for council's to tax us more and deliver poorer services. It's all a con.

Colin Soames, London,