WE ALL know waste is bad. It is the curse of capitalism, of prosperity, of consumerism. There is hardly a corner of the world immune to its invasions; the remotest island in the South Atlantic, untenanted by all but penguins and seals, probably has its coronet of litter along its seashore, paper debris which has travelled thousands of miles that it might fulfill its polluting mission. The entire biosphere has been invaded and colonised by our wastes - from the chlorofluorocarbons in the skies to the rotting merchantmen and submarines in the deep.
Nowhere in Europe seems to have the tortured attitude towards the environment that we do. We want cars, but we don't want the pollution which is caused by their manufacture; we want petrol, but we don't want petrochemical works. We want prosperity, but not the dirt which has been the foundation of prosperity throughout the world. Our grass industry, upon "which our cattle, dairy, cheese and food processing industry is based, is entirely dependent on the oil industry. No filthy stacks towering for hundreds of feet above the Gull, no Irish economy.
We have such high demands for: (a) growth and (b) no pollution, never admitting that "a" inevitably causes "b". The only ecologically sound economy is the economy which doesn't grow and which subsists on "hunted and speared ruminants and the collection of berries and wild grasses.
Poor Old Brendan
So it is hard not to sympathise with poor old Brendan Howlin, given one of the most unattractive jobs in Government. The Department of E Coli is expected to dispose of sewage without sewerage; is expected to recycle, regardless of the merits. Who actually ponders upon the virtues, say, of paper recycling?
The Minister recently warned that companies which failed to support a major recycling initiative, designed to remove 120,000 tonnes of packaging from the annual amount of waste, would face legal sanction. On the face of it, this is an irreproachably virtuous argument; paper waste is one of the curses of the modern world. We therefore should all be applauding his aim of achieving a 25 per cent recycling rate of packaging over the next five years.
To support this admirable objective, packaging companies are being levied to raise more than £2 million a year, rising to £4.5 million. Mary Kelly, of the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation, said the Repak recycling programme was a permanent commitment to the environment.
There's a problem here. A small problem. The paper recycling programme throughout Europe has been one of the most successful of all the environmental campaigns. Most countries are well ahead of Ireland in this regard. And what do you think the consequences are? Do you think there are now more trees in the world because of this? Do you think there is more lovely green afforestation because of the trees which are not felled to feed our insatiable need for paper?
Pressure to Recycle
The reverse has been the case. The paper manufacturers of Europe, under political pressure to recycle, and finding that everyone wants to give them wastepaper for free, have diverted their resources towards reprocessing. Recycling newsprint is in fact a filthy business, ecologically profoundly damaging, since vast amounts of chemicals are used to treat the paper, and those chemicals have to be disposed of in mainland Europe, probably into the Rhine, which then discharges its charming effluent into the North Sea.
That is bad enough. But there is another side to paper recycling. People tend to think the trees used in paper production are venerable old things, there since time immemorial, and paper recycling will save these handsome old beasts. A nice thought but a totally inaccurate one.
The trees used in paper manufacture are harvested. They are trees as a crop, and like all crops - they have to be planted. Because of the shift towards recycled paper, the demand for: "Northern European wood pulp has dropped enormously in the paper making processes. Ask any farmer: if the demand for a crop drops, do you continue to plant it? Not unless I'm paid to, he'll reply.
Nobody is prepared to pay the wood pulp producers of northern Europe to replant the full forestations they have felled in the past. Therefore, the replanting of the forestlands has been drastically reduced. There are less trees under cultivation now than there were 10 years ago. In 10 years time, tree production in Scandinavia will have fallen drastically; and so too will the cleansing effect which trees have on the environment.
No doubt there's nothing we can do about this we cannot buck the trend which the virtuous across Europe have already set. And maybe in this case, for once, we can actually have our cake and eat it. Maybe the bottomless coffers of the European Union can cough up the necessary euros to replant the treeless wastelands of northern Europe.
More Subsidies
Thus, we would manage in the north of the union to have subsidised forested setasides, while elsewhere - and here in particular - farmers would be subsidised to have unforested setasides, with perhaps fresh subsidies to drain the Shannon in order to create more pastures, which will then cause us to exceed EU quotas, so the newly acquired land would then perforce become another subsidised unforested setaside. It all makes sense. I know it does. I just haven't worked out bow, that's all.
The problem of course is that the recycling movement is right. It makes everybody feel better, so it must be right.
But feeling better is not the answer. It is that attempt to reconcile private piety with the conduct of public affairs which bedevils the formulation of so much policy - especially environmental policy - throughout Europe. As poor Brendan Howlin knows, E Coli is not banished from Galway Bay by a virtuous soul; nor the treeless wastes of Finland replanted.