Is Pelagius wasting his time?

I haven't spoken much about my street recycling project lately, but it has been proceeding steadily now for nearly 2 1/2 years. Every week I collect about 10 kg of cans, glass and plastic bottles and place it in green sacks for collection by the council. I do this partly out of an inherent sense of tidiness, but more because I know the street cleaners will not recycle any of the waste they retrieve.

But recently I heard to my horror that a number of councils have been selling their recycling to places like India and China, who cherry-pick the contents, removing aluminium cans, which are as good as currency (30,000 cans per tonne; £1600-2000 per tonne), but then consigning the rest, especially plastic bottles, to their own landfill sites.

If properly managed, recycling can be a profitable business: look at the Germans, who have almost made a religion out of recycling everything they can, and making a lot of money in the process. There is almost no limit to human inventiveness when it comes to re-using that which society discards as useless, but there needs to be the political will to make such a thing happen. And right now it seems many people in Britain don't really care about these hippy ideas, or at best pay the barest of lip service to them. And as moral crimes go, that's one of the worst...