Only about twenty percent of the waste in the UK is recycled. This pales by comparison to most other European nations who routinely recycle about half of their refuse. Why and how did the UK fall behind most of its neighbours?
The how is easy — the UK did not make comparable investments in recycling programmes when they first became popular in the 1970s. But why did they fail to do this? That is a much more complicated question.
The easy answer is that recycling was far more expensive than simply stowing rubbish in landfills or transporting it to combustion plants. Of course, both of these options were far more damaging to the environment, but officials simply ignored that. What was most important to them was balancing the budget, since the economy was struggling at the time. In short, no one wanted to pay more for new recycling programmes or Stamford skip hire.
Thankfully, things have changed since those days. Dumping rubbish has become more and more expensive as the UK is running low on landfills. This often means they have to buy up private real estate, which is awfully expensive. Burning refuse is also inefficient and causes an incredible amount of pollution.
Then there is the fact that recycling has become a much more efficient process over the last few decades. Yes, the trucks still create pollution when they pick the bottles, cans, and newspapers up. But the recycling facilities themselves run like a well-oiled machine these days. They are far cheaper to run and create less pollution than they did in the past.
