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Rubbish Rubbish

Yet again we hear talk about councils charging for rubbish collection. Don't the policy wonks who come up with ideas like this think them through?

If people have to pay to have their rubbish taken away, some of them will just dump it. You don't need a first class degree from Oxbridge to be able to work that out.

The cost of rubbish disposal needs to be built-in to purchase prices through some tax mechanism, so people can get rid of it with no questions asked. This has the added advantage of giving a financial incentive to people not to buy rubbish in the first place.

One immediate effect would be to discourage over-packaging and promote re-use of containers, as the less they cost to get rid of, the less they would cost. So we might be able to break up our strawberry packaging and put in round the plants in our gardens, instead of having to fill up our bins with a load of plastic, whilst glass bottles would be collected up and re-used instead of being left lying around and smashed.

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