Mike Hosking: Maybe recycling is just a giant national scam

As if the Christchurch City Council didn't have enough problems, it's been hit with the need to bail out one of its companies.

EcoCentral is the council's recycling business. And it looks increasingly like recycling on a large scale is somewhat of a national scam.

The council is giving EcoCentral more than $3 million given it's been faced with a collapse in the price of some products its processes, such as paper.

This stems from the fact China woke up, decided it was no longer a dumping ground for the world's rubbish and stopped taking it. At that moment the price for a variety of recyclables collapsed.

Now, a number of questions are raised out of all of this. Not the least of which is: was China ever actually recycling?

Do we really care about the planet and recycling? Or was China merely a rubbish bin for the world, including us?

Further, various councils paid EcoCentral a processing fee, largely, it seems because the recycling work they did before all this trouble reared its head wasn't actually viable. So in other words it's a subsidised service.

None of this is ever put forward in the recycling debate. It's not unlike the carbon market. They invent a market to save the planet and yet the price of carbon is left to its own devices, tanks, and is worth nothing.

If recycling is such a good idea and so useful and such a wondrous reusing of
resources, why doesn't it at least pay its way - or preferably make a profit?

The whole key to these virtuous ideas, whether it be a sugar tax, recycling, carbon or banning so-called single-use plastic bags is that it makes sense, works and there is a future industry in it.

How many times do the likes of the James Shaws of this world reassure us that, no, we don't want coal, oil, petrol and cars, because the alternatives are so much more useful and productive?

And yet I think now with the growing amount of evidence we have, we can quite rightly ask, are they?

EcoCentral's issue doesn't mean all recycling is a scam. I am sure there are lots of examples of people turning something back into something else.

But it's increasingly evident that a lot of it was fraudulent.

And now that China has shut up shop, we as a country literally don't have a clue what to do with our rubbish.

No, we don't want to bury it at dumps, but ask yourself: just how many companies do you want to subsidise? How much eco fraud do you want to take part in to fool yourself that the alternative is working?

China did us a favour, China was your classic out-of-sight, out-of-mind scenario.

We pretended we cared, when in fact most of us have never really cared enough to actually find out a few facts.

And now the facts are front and centre the truth is: they are ugly.

And we've at least in part been kidding ourselves.