Media: the great recycling con
Saturday 6 April 2013
 Unfortunately, we are not dealing with serious journalism here as the paper – in the form of writer Steve Doughty – now asserts that every year "twelve million tons of your carefully sorted waste is being dumped in foreign landfill sites". We are looking at a classic Mail invention. According to the latest Defra figures - annual household waste is running at 22.9 million tons, of which 43 percent is "recycled, composted or reused". That amounts to 10.7 million tons. Even then, by no means is the larger part of that quantity is exported. Not a little, as the Mail has already claimed, is actually landfilled in the UK. And that leaves something of a gap. However, if we look to quantities of commercial and industrial (C&I) waste, we are looking at 47.9 million tons (2009 figures), of which 52 percent, or 25 million tons, was recycled or reused. One might imagine the Mail adds in some of the C&I waste to get its twelve million tons figure, which would make the claim a simple exaggeration. But even that does not really compute. A search for more detail leads us to the Environment Agency website, which tells us that the only really accurate statistics on waste export relate to "notifiable waste", largely hazardous waste – of which about 617,000 tons was exported (2010). As to general waste, we are referred to Her Majesties Revenue and Customs (HMRC) trade database for the UK, from which the EA estimated that England exported around 12.5 million tons and imported about 1.3 million tons of waste in 2006, giving a net export of around 11.2 million tons. The majority of these movements, we are told, are accounted for by "green list waste" (99 per cent for exports and 91 per cent for imports). And here, we find that metallic and paper/board wastes account for the greatest proportion (63 per cent and 31 per cent respectively). When we go to the source, the trade database, we actually find that the "waste" category includes scrap metals, and much else besides. That makes it impossible to determine actual quantities recycled municipal waste exported. Yet that is the subject of the Mail story, with the story centering around the claim of twelve million tons. Given that the nearest thing we have is a 2006 figure, and that 91 percent is metallic waste and scrap paper (much of that from industry), the actual amount of recycled domestic waste that ends up on its way to "China, India and Indonesia" – where the Mail says it goes - must be relatively small. Deduct the amount of "notified waste" and it is possibly no more than a few hundred thousand tons, if that. Of that, necessarily, a smaller proportion ends up in landfill. The story, therefore, doesn't stand up. For sure, there is a story, but the Mail doesn't get near it. And sadly, the very information which would make the story does not seem to exist. Inventing a spurious statistic is not the answer, and as that is at the heart of what the Mail has to offer, it makes the paper's story worthless - the story itself is a con. The reality is that, when it comes to the huge amount of effort and expense that goes into recycling domestic waste, there are no data on much of the ten million tons or so collected for recycling actually ends up being reused, and how much goes for final disposal. Furthermore, as Raedwaldrecalls, there is not even any requirement to keep records. There, perversely, lies the real story. As Booker recounts, there is a huge and increasing amount spent on waste collection and disposal – largely at the behest of the EU's Waste Framework Directive - but no one really knows what happens to it. That is nothing short of a scandal - and is a story that should be told. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 06/04/2013 |
Media: secrecy for sale
Saturday 6 April 2013
 Styled as "one of the largest and most complex cross border investigative projects in journalism history", it is co-ordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), working with more than 86 journalists in 46 countries in "an attempt to strip away the biggest mystery associated with tax havens: the owners of anonymous companies". The exploration began when a computer hard drive packed with corporate data arrived in the post. Gerard Ryle, ICIJ's director, obtained the small black box as a result of his three-year investigation of Australia's Firepower scandal, a case involving offshore havens and corporate fraud. The hard drive contained more than 260 gigabytes, the equivalent of half a million books. Its files included two million e-mails, four large databases. There were details of more than 122,000 offshore companies or trusts, and nearly 12,000 intermediaries (agents or "introducers"), in more than 170 countries. Ostensibly, the aim is "to allow the public to see inside the offshore world in a way that has never before been possible", and while it is acknowledged that much of what will be revealed is "perfectly legal", the extreme secrecy offered by tax havens also facilitates the use of anonymous entities to commit crimes, evade taxes, hide assets from creditors and avoid regulations. Says ICIJ: "This secrecy can ultimately undermine democracy by granting a certain class of individuals the ability to play by a different set of rules", and hence the game is on to reveal the names of the guilty ones. With the Guardian amongst the papers taking the lead in the UK, alongside the BBC's Panoramathere seems a definite left-wing bias, so the motivation must be seriously suspect. But that does not stop some interesting and important material emerging. Cutting out the middle men, the main stories and background are detailed on the ICIJ website, and there is doubtless more to come. So far, though, the Guardian has only fingered a very few people. One such is Jean-Jacques Augier, Hollande's campaign co-treasurer and close friend, who has been forced to publicly identify his Chinese business partner. This emerges as Hollande is mired in financial scandal because his former budget minister concealed a Swiss bank account for 20 years and repeatedly lied about it. In Mongolia, the country's former finance minister and deputy speaker of its parliament it another one outed. He says he may have to resign from politics as a result of the investigation. And these are but the first of the names using of companies in offshore havens, particularly in the British Virgin Islands, where owners' identities normally remain secret. Nevertheless, given that the multi-national team has been working on this for the best part of 15 months, there is remarkably little to show for the effort, even if we are offered a good insight into how the shady world of nominee companies actually work. And despite the thinness of the material, there seems sufficient for a co-ordinated demand for action on tax havens, not only in the British press but also in Germany, where Schäuble is calling for an FBI-type organisation to target tax evasion. Probably, we are now getting close to the real agenda, and it may be only a matter time before the "colleagues" get involved, demanding a "European solution" to a European problem – even though there is a global dimension. And one could imagine the Guardian being fully in favour of that. Yet, despite all this, there is at the heart of the stories, a real issue. Before this is over, we might get a better understanding of how the "dirty money" business really works. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 06/04/2013 |
Saturday, 6 April 2013
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