On Thursday I found a parcel waiting at the front door of my Wandsworth flat: a ‘free’ food waste caddy, a starter roll of compostable liners and a note from the council that deserves a place in the annals of municipal self-congratulation. Recycling my food waste, it explained, could save me “as much as £720 every year”. My leftovers would become “a sustainable power source and liquid fertiliser”. And because it is “much cheaper” for the council to recycle scraps than to bin them with the rubbish, the whole exercise “helps keep your Council Tax low”. Each of these claims turns out to be false, an evasion or a subsidy in disguise.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman never tired of pointing out. A local authority that pretends otherwise is not practising environmental stewardship. It is practising virtue signalling at other people’s expense. Let’s take the £720 first. It is not a recycling saving at all. It is a Love Food Hate Waste talking point about buying less food in the first place, describing what the average family could save by throwing away less edible food. That is a saving from wasting less, not from recycling more. WRAP, the climate NGO behind the campaign, now puts the annual cost of edible food binned by a family of four at £1,000. But the money is lost by typical household behaviour, not because food waste remains uncollected by the local council.
Separately collected food waste can indeed go to anaerobic digestion, which produces biogas and a digestate fertiliser. But biomethane from digestion is also eligible for the Government’s Green Gas Support Scheme, a tariff subsidy. A “sustainable power source” propped up by a tariff is not a free lunch; it is merely moved from domestic bills to general taxpayers. The household is thus drafted as an unpaid recycler, subject to the good Wandsworth council members that claim to be saving its constituents their own money.
Nor, to be fair to the council’s worthies, is the caddy entirely their idea. Wandsworth’s own website states that all households in the borough must have weekly food waste collections from March 31st 2026, a duty that traces to the Environment Act 2021. This was passed under a Conservative government and is now being delivered under the label of Simpler Recycling. Whitehall wrote the script; Wandsworth Council merely turned up in appropriate costume and supplied the marketing angle.
Social costs and benefits
Had anyone on the Wandsworth Waste Project Team taken the trouble to have a cursory acquaintance of the available analysis, they would have found a remarkably consistent verdict. Thomas Kinnaman of Bucknell University, having reviewed two decades of American recycling experience in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, argued for replacing several state recycling mandates with a moderate landfill tax. A study of a random national sample of municipalities by Robert Bohm, Kinnaman and two co-authors found that both average and marginal costs of recycling exceed those of simple collection and disposal at a landfill. Daniel Benjamin of the Property and Environment Research Center calculated that, even after crediting the resale of recovered materials, curb side programmes in 2009 cost on average $199 a ton against $119 for landfill and concluded that mandatory programmes leave society worse off. It argues that U.S. municipal curb side recycling programmes waste resources and probably do little, if anything, to benefit the environment.
In an article entitled ‘Recycling Is Garbage’ in 1996, New York Times journalist John Tierney concluded that mandatory recycling did not make economic or environmental sense. It legendarily provoked the most hate mail ever delivered to the Times. He returned in 2015 to report that it was still typically more expensive to recycle household waste than to landfill it. He likened the zeal of the faithful to a penance for the sin of affluence.
Food waste, Wandsworth Council’s new enthusiasm, fares worse still. A 2025 study by Jackson Somers of the University of Connecticut, published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, found that a curb side organics collection programme cost per household was nine times the social benefit of the avoided methane. Across the United States, the median expansion would cost $478 per tonne of CO2-equivalent avoided, against an assumed social cost of carbon of $51. It should be noted here that the concept of the social cost of carbon itself is highly disputed, and it could well be negative if the greening benefits of higher atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are fully taken into account.
Wandsworth’s operation is far from frugal: the council has explained that separate vehicles now collect rubbish, recycling, food waste and small electricals, each at its own time. One more fleet, one more caddy, one more cost on the beleaguered taxpayer. None of this is an argument against recycling as such. Recycled aluminium needs about 95% less energy than metal smelted from bauxite, so scrap commands a price, and a price is all a collector needs. Nobody requires a council leaflet to persuade a scrap dealer to fetch a can. Even Defra concedes that for some plastics the value on secondary markets does not outweigh the cost of collection. Free markets sort winners from losers objectively; policy mandates, however dressed up as virtuous signals, are a net cost to the taxpayer.
The Government’s own arithmetic
The council’s claim that food waste recycling keeps Council Tax low collides with Whitehall’s own paperwork. Defra’s final impact assessment in December 2024 for “Simpler Recycling” models the preferred option with English councils bearing £722 million in transition costs and £567 million in higher ongoing costs in present-value terms. The headline saving to councils of £188 million appears only after crediting about £1 billion of additional garden-waste charges on households and £474 million of deposit-return savings. Remove those and the ratepayer is left holding the caddy.
The department’s £5.9 billion “net benefit to society” for the whole package tells a similar tale. It rests on £10.5 billion of “carbon savings”; remove that single line and the package is some £4.5 billion in the red. The Defra claim rests entirely on how carbon is valued. Everything else in the model (collection costs, transition costs, sorting and the rest) nets out negative once the carbon credit is removed. Defra conveniently chose a carbon price that makes the sum positive. The UK values carbon by the marginal abatement cost, meaning the cost of cutting a tonne needed to hit legally binding carbon budgets. The circularity of Defra carbon accounting, driven by Net Zero ideologues, is astounding.
Household time, meanwhile, is treated as a rounding error: familiarisation and inconvenience costs to householders are not accounted for because Defra does not expect them to be significant. The time value of the person rinsing the caddy is evidently free. Tellingly, the same document abandons the plan for free garden-waste collections because the cost was disproportionate to the “carbon benefits”.
And the “free” in “free caddy” rests on the Government’s promise to fund councils’ net additional costs, the so-called new burdens doctrine. The Wandsworth Council leaflet says food waste recycling “helps keep your Council Tax low”. But council tax may well stay low locally only because the Treasury is covering the extra cost, not because recycling is cheap. So the cost of the new service has merely moved from the council’s books to the national taxpayer.
Milton Friedman’s dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch has apparently not reached Wandsworth; one does not expect a copy of Free To Choose (1980) in the council library. But the deeper problem is the familiar mixture of luxury beliefs and other people’s money. Economists call the satisfaction of doing good a warm glow, and it is a preference, not a resource saving. When a state compels the ‘environmental’ ritual and raises the tax rates, the glow is enjoyed by officials and the chill by ordinary taxpayers.
It is the pattern I described in Ed Miliband’s carbon-capture crusade: policy as moral theatre, financed by somebody else. And it flourishes where the ordinary business of local government is neglected. ‘Woke’ councils seem to have far more time for planning environmental salvation than for potholes, or for easing the fines heaped on hated motorists in Sadiq Khan’s London. As my Daily Sceptic colleague Ben Pile reported last week, recycling centres across the country have been turning away old fridges and freezers, which are now piling up in laybys. Recycling is in trouble where it counts, and officialdom’s answer is another caddy.
The propensity to truck, barter and exchange
What would a rational policy look like? Britain already taxes the tip. The standard rate of landfill tax rose on April 1st to £130.75 a tonne. This tax is not an objective measure of real costs faced by society in getting rid of its rubbish. It is yet another ‘nudge’ by the nanny state to encourage producers to switch to ‘more sustainable alternatives’. ‘Sustainability’ is one of the great weasel words of the modern age, fully in keeping with those who would force taxpayers to ‘save the planet’.
Wandsworth Council should stick to its knitting. Council leaflets should tell residents the truth: that food recycling is a statutory compliance cost, not a saving, and that somebody is paying for it. Let voluntary, price-driven recycling of aluminium, cardboard and scrap metal, like other economic activity, take place by mutually consenting adults freely contracting with each other. Adam Smith argued that the “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” was inherent in human nature and gave rise to the division of labour. Hayek called the belief that a few well-meaning officials can know better than prices what is worth saving the fatal conceit. Wandsworth Council worthies should serve the local public good and let moralising behaviour be the free choice of its constituents.
This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/24/the-great-recycling-swindle/
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
