Recycled Wisdom

A group of Swedish environmentalists, including Valfrid Paulsson, a former director of its environmental protection agency, have turned on recycling, reports the British Telegraph. An excerpt: The Swedish group said that the "vision of a recycling market booming by 2010 was a dream 40 years ago and is still just a dream".

The use of incineration to burn household waste—including packaging and food—"is best for the environment, the economy and the management of natural resources", they wrote in an article for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Technological improvements had made incineration cleaner and the process could be used to generate electricity, cutting dependency on oil.

Mr Paulsson and his co-campaigners said that collecting household cartons was "very unprofitable". Used bottles and glass cost glass companies twice as much as the raw materials, and recycling plastics was uneconomical, they said. "Plastics are made from oil and can quite simply be incinerated."