Most of the sustainability propaganda doesn’t stack up. Most of your recycling is a waste of time. More could be achieved more quickly and more cheaply by handing the problem back to business – and getting the State out of the equation.

Before you dismiss this as yet another why-oh-why bleat, there is a serious recycling point being made. But I want to open by admitting to anti-social behaviour. I quite deliberately, and with malice aforethought, put things in the wrong recycling boxes – having cunningly disguised their nature beforehand.

I suppose it’s a form of cowardly rebellion – a sort of mild micro-riot – that allows me to gain a small victory over the silo-dwellers: they pretend they can’t hear us, so I pretend that I’m garbage-blind.

But it doesn’t qualify for real Resistance stuff, because it isn’t sabotage. Sabotage, you see, is designed to cock up the enemy’s systems – and thus induce failure in their war effort. What I do, I do with a crystal clear conscience for two simple reasons: first, there is no way my crimes will reduce the effectiveness of our Council’s reycling, because everyone knows that the private contractors at the other end chuck it all in the same pile anyway; and second, because to be effective, something has to have a point. And there is no point at all to the rubbish-separation campaign: it isn’t going to make so much as a gnat’s difference to the planet’s survival.

In our local area, the recycling Schutzstaffel have dictated that we should put glass in one container, paper and cardboard in another, plastic and cans in yet another, and food in a small plastic box that sits in our kitchen.

The last of these comes with a special bio-degradable liner-bag which requires the delicacy of a brain surgeon to open it without ripping the whole thing to shreds. It doesn’t fit that well in the food container, and – once over half-full – will collapse under its own weight as and when you remove it.

The emptiest container outside our house when the bin-men come is the original wheelie-bin with which we were issued ten years ago, before all this nonsense started. Designated as for ‘dry goods’ by our Council, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to those hugging the Earth that once you’ve removed food, paper, cardboard and plastic from the mix, there’s not a lot left.

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Is it really a pointless exercise? Yes, I’d say without a shadow of doubt it is – beyond the maintenance of employment. I’ve watched our various recycling chaps for months on their rounds, and there’s 2.4 times as many of them as there used to be. But forgetting the standard ‘they’re employing their own electors’ Labour-bashing, Britain engaging in this hugely expensive recycling bollocks will make no difference to the spinning blue orb’s fate – whatever that might be.

For a start, even accepting this activity might be important, the strategy is flawed from start to finish.

UK households generate thirty million tonnes of rubbish a year. That’s almost half a ton emerging from each and every home. Amazing – but thanks to NIMBY, there simply isn’t room for it here. Even according to the otherwise clinically insane Environment Agency’s website, waste exported from the UK doubled from around seven million tonnes in 2002 to around 14 million tonnes in 2009. The carbon miles and footprints effect thus negates the whole exercise right off the bat. But the UK is still way down the international league when it comes to recycling the stuff – it currently recycles 22%: when not being exported by smelly lorries, it goes into landfill – see earlier under ‘they put it all in the same hole at the other end’.

The reason we’ve gone recycling-crazy is, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, an EU directive from around 2005. This ordered the citizens of the United Kingdom to roughly double their recycling rates by 2008. (We didn’t, by the way.) Equally predictable is that our target is to recycle three times as much of our crap (around 75%) by 2020. What a happy year that’s going to be: everything will have been achieved, and so we can all go home and read about the latest Newscorp delaying tactic from Michael Silverleaf QC.

But it isn’t going to make a ha’porth of difference. 60% of our household waste is packaging. We have all this packaging for three reasons: to gain competitive advantage over rival brands, to keep food fresh and thus satisfy the mania of  Health & Safety, and to make life easier for the multiple supermarkets in terms of delivery, stacking, display and so forth. We have all this packaging, but we don’t need it. As usual, government at all levels bottles out of doing the right (but difficult) thing: telling the manufacturers and distributors to cut it down to the bare minimum, and firing everyone in Health & Safety. (As an additional point here, ask yourself how many trees get cut down each year to keep the H&SE in paper).

Our problem is that we make too much rubbish, import too much rubbish, buy too much rubbish – and throw too much away. Hold that thought.

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Now I recognise that some of you already have a bp of 180/130 because it seems as though I accept carbon reduction should be spearheaded by reducing transport output, and cutting down trees is a bad thing for a person to do. But in many circumstances around the world, I don’t accept either of those assertions. My point is simply this: whatever you believe about ecology, mathematically the sum effect of the way we recycle and dispose of rubbish in the UK can be expressed thus:

0(1)/0(2) + 0(3) = 0(4)

where 0(1) is recycling, o(2) is dumping elsewhere, (0)3 is contractor fiddling and 0(4) is planetary survival. Many mathematicians are fascinated by the idea that 0/0 = infinity, but this is because such people are easily amused. The net effect is, at best, a big fat zero: on a list of 100 things to do to insure against what might lie ahead for us climatologically, the UK’s recycling effort storms in at No 479.

If that assessment appears glib, then put our efforts into perspective. Even allowing for the 100% disagreement in either direction on all topics to do with climate change, atmospheric survival, ozone layers and tree depletion, what difference is ‘sustainable development’ going to make to anything?

The short answer given is that it will cut down the amount of mining and carbon-producing processes required to replace it; and thus mean we don’t wipe out all the glass, metal and wood available on Planet Earth. But this is shot full of holes. Glass is made from sand, and the world is full of deserts. Some major forms of wood are already entirely sustainable –  pine for example is very plentiful and grows at a pace which more than cancels out the lumberjack’s chainsaw. In many northern latitudes, pine increases the production of greenhouse gases by reducing snow-reflection.

All over Africa, Chinese mining engineers are busy surveying, testing, drilling and holding out huge wads of aid in return for getting at what’s under the ground. In northern Botswana, there is a very thick tectonic plate so rich in minerals that it shifts about and goes on tilt alarmingly. The effect of this – and I’m not kidding – is to make rivers run in the wrong direction. This isn’t man-made, but it’s potential for socio-ecological disaster is undeniable. Digging half of it out would have consequences we can’t predict. Digging most things out of the earth is a bad idea for the same reason.Drilling things out of the seabed is even dafter – necessary in the short-term, but still mad.

What drives the miners in Africa and Australia in the end is demand, pure and simple. The solution is to reduce demand and improve manufacture – not spread the residue of what we’ve already made all over the place like so many RAF officers digging a tunnel out of Colditz.

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Let me illustrate this by looking at some genuinely bad news. Most of the techno-gear to which we seem addicted is made from metal, and such so-called ‘e-waste’ is reaching disastrous levels. E-waste includes pcs, mobile phones, microwaves, Blackberries, Ipads and all the rest of the toys. These items contain lead, cadmium, copper and many other metals with toxic properties. And lots of chunks of the planet’s wildlife will have to go to feed that metallic manufacturing need.

Now here’s the very bad news. On average, the lifespan of home computers in the developed world has dropped from six to two years over the last decade. More than 675 million mobile phones are sold per year. In developed countries, they have a lifecycle of less than two years. Over 183 million computers are sold every year; many of them are replacements for older models that are discarded. By the  the end of 2010, there were around 720 million new computers in use around the world.

I’m sorry, but if anyone thinks, in such a global environment, that anally putting glass here and plastic there and food in the auto-collapsing recyclable bag every week is truly what the problem is about, then….I give up. You’re obviously Ed Miliband.

Once again, governments and international symposia around the globe have funked the required approach. Just as Helsinki ignored the water shortage time-bomb completely, so too the G20 nations refuse to address the twin causes of our disposal dilemma: blind pursuit of repeat purchase and – closely allied to this – manufacturing quality so poor that everything stops working too quickly – and then has no spares available. Instead – entirely predictably – the spineless folks in charge leave the producers and distributors to get on with their lunacy…and plump instead for yet more anonymous bureaucrats walking up and down with cameras to spy on bin-crime.

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However, I wrote earlier on that we could throw less away. Most households don’t recycle – or rather, extend the life – of their possessions – they just chuck them out. Here in our European summer spot, we don’t do that – we don’t use anything wastefully, and we use the bare minimum of recycling services.

All our plastic bags are used a second time. Empty plastic bottles are used to protect saplings and vegetables from animals and frost. All the water off our roof goes into butts, and thence back onto the plants. I rarely pee indoors – even the short-duration loo flush uses far too much water. When there’s enough in it, we use well water on the garden. Waste paper becomes an accompaniment to kindling (better a bit of CO2 from the fire than hundreds of diesel-guzzling lorries dumping it in landfill). Other excess paper is pressed and cut into blocks as firelighter. Every tree chopped down for the fire is replaced by three others. All the wind-blown branches go into the wood-store as kindling. Most of our glass this year will be smashed into hardcore with last year’s building rubbish as the base for a terrace I’m making. Gosh, we’re so much holier than thou.

But you see, we’re not holy at all: I don’t do much of this for ‘ecological reasons’. The aims of all this are (1) to reduce dependence on the State to a bare minimum, (2) to conserve things that really aren’t being sustained – especially water, and (2) to reuse where possible rather than consume. I think a number of State services will shortly disappear – and inflation is coming. So better to get used to having more shit and less money in one’s life now.

The ultimate madness of  our current model of capitalism is that it encourages people do do stuff they know is a bad idea – because human beings have instincts, and markets don’t. Markets are far too busy being decisive to be right most of the time. Although QE isn’t really there to encourage consumption, it’s billed as that. But from 2009 through 2010, the majority of tax cuts went into savings. The system is breaking down because we, the Citizens, know better what’s good for us. We’d like more time with our families, and a more manageable mortgage. We’d be happy to earn a bit less if it meant keeping the job, and we’d even go part time: all the ONS employment statistics suggest that this is precisely what real people are doing. We’d rather stick with the mobile we’ve got than be given a new one with 539 updates on it.

The masters of the Universe, naturally, are still steaming ahead, churning out rubbish in the making, talking up the markets and taking vast bonuses. But they are utterly, totally, infinitely wrong about what normal people want, and what they will do in the end. This will be their downfall. And – equally important – what they do is costing all of us a fortune in recycling that could be massively reduced.

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By nature, I am not a ‘tree-hugger’. I don’t like open-toed sandals, although I accept they are practical in certain climates. I think a huge amount of sustainability recycling is pointless bollocks. I think water is the resource of which we will run out – long before energy becomes a problem….if indeed it ever does. I would like to ensure that those who make, distribute and display could cut their packaging by two-thirds. I would like more people to recycle instead of the State doing it, because the State is run by people on a planet even further away than that occupied by investment bankers. I would like Britain to import less, and I would like electronics manufacturers to make things to last – not be replaced by a newer version within nine months. I don’t know if we are going to have global warming – and neither does James Delingpole, or indeed anyone – but I do know I prefer clean to dirty air, and beautiful sunsets to LA smogs.

Cue lot of threads telling me all this is naive/uneconomic/wouldn’t work etc etc. It works for me. As for it not working under our current globalist insanity, you’ve got me confused with someone who gives a monkey’s.