The reality on the ground is always opposed to the fantasy of Government. Especially one which is out of control stupid, on the subject of recycling.

Two events which demonstrate this in my own area are, recycle bins are picked through by the entrepreneurs of don't waste the waste, the night before pick-up.
Now a recycling station that pays dividends for rubbish was installed, that has a cash outcome, payed by weight.
The council now pay the robbers of the council loot. What a F* joke.

The other is far more sinister. Reclycled concrete.
This must be, ( by council edict), carted 160 klm return trip, to a recycling point for disposal: a little bit of bureaucratic nonesense that forces the reality, that it is more expensive to dispose of old concrete, than it is to lay new.

In this area, a truck load of rubbish will be carted six hours return to the Gold Coast tip to save money. Another FM.

This is all happening in the town that kicked out of their homes, thirty eight families in twelve months, making life easy for the rent gougers, to freely profiteer from temporary road workers passing thirty klm Westward: ably assisted by further council edicts prohibiting the homless from camping in the gutter overnight!

What world am I living in?

Dan.

Dan.

It certainly is a hoax, with rubbish sitting in storage sheds waiting to combust, as it has in my city, twice.

Good article.

The local Greenie council is foisting extra bins on us to sort our waste into (latest including greenwaste) while their contents are rejoined at the landfill site since Asia stopped accepting our recyclables and other waste treatment is uneconomically unviable. They won't go with incineration for now, out of ideology.

Its obvious to even the intellectually challenged that we have to recycle everything! If we would just embrace carbon-free nuclear energy,i.e., MSR thorium! Have energy cheap enough for the task! Unquestionably, the cost of energy makes most recycling uneconomic!

We just cannot keep cutting down our trees/critical rainforest faster than we can grow more! The only hoax on display here is that of the charlatan, robber barons, who see their market share decline due to the competition that fair dinkum recycling would create/empower.

Moreover, a halfway decent recycling policy made mandatory would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in regional and rural communities along with entrepreneurial wealth-creating
opportunities.

Almost tailor-made for regional/rural co-ops. Throw in government-backed MSR thorium/Graphene highways to transmit this vastly cheaper source of energy and everything we just don't recycle now suddenly becomes, recyclable.

I'm informed we silica ship sand to Korea for their glassworks, where our exported gas is used to transform it into glass! Then ship the glass back here while megatons of recyclable glass goes to landfill here!

It's mad hatter's tea party economics! And tantamount to putting the inmates in charge of the asylum?

We ship the sand the gas and the finished product, leaving the profit and any and all tax liability there along with most of the usual economic flow on factors!

What genius dreamed that prime example up!?

Yes sure, glass making requires affordable gas! We can make all we could ever possibly use by making the recycling of all biological waste in methane-producing biodigesters mandatory!

Put the recyclable water back where it's needed into a parched inland along with carbon-rich soil improver also made a part of the byproduct!

Surplus methane can be put through a simple catalytic conversion process to convert it to methanol, an excellent alternative for petrol or simply compressed and used as a vastly superior diesel substitute!

Yes, this alternative would possibly hurt some bottom line somewhere and see oil import revenues drop sharply? You'd have a problem with that or the 20+ annual billions that we'd save in the outcome?
Alan B.

I'm informed that recycling all our waste tires could create as many as 4,000 barrels of oil annually?

That there's more precious metal in Ewaste than that ever recovered from even the richest known orebody. And only requires it be crushed down to small sand-sized fractions to make gravity separation and flotation/magnetic separation recovery a piece of cake!

Most plastic can be recycled up to seven times before it's no longer possible, even then it can be baled and used as a source of carbon in steel production?

There's just so much more and with it comes great wealth and job creation opportunities!

The only thing missing is the political will and proactive governments! That's all! Nothing else save the pecuniary interests of some politician, ex-public servants and an assorted medley of robber barons who believe the world owes them a living and the birthrights of the privileged elite!?

God help my poor beggar country!
Alan B.

its called the Canberra bubble. I lived there for decades and public servants really believed they were underpaid and overworked!