Oily tuna cans, crusty yoghurt pots, ill-shaped peanut butter jars… A significant chunk of our lives in the UK is spent washing our recycling. Some back-of-the-packet maths puts it at 1.5 billion hours a year. That’s £18 billion in minimum-wage time spent sorting rubbish.

This would feel a lot more palatable if it was genuinely making a difference. Unfortunately, only 17% of plastic waste is actually recycled. Most of it – 58% – is burned for energy. Given that we have, in the UK, some of the most expensive electricity bills in the developed world, we could do with the additional energy and security – but much of it is not even burnt in this country, and fuel-from-waste doesn’t diminish the annoyance that it only takes one malefactor to contaminate whole loads with their unwashed gubbins. The rest of our rubbish – 25% – ends up in landfill or is exported as someone else’s problem.

This is not a functioning system. It’s a performance. And one for which we pay ever rising council tax to stage. It exploits citizens’ goodwill around helping the environment, keeping everyone feeling busy and responsible while the real solution – automation – sits in the wings, unused.

We should be using robots.

We have the technology to sort and process waste after collection – the robots and systems already exist. Companies like Recycleye and Greyparrot, and US-based CleanRobotics and AMP Robotics are in the vanguard and gaining traction. But adoption is too slow: the government isn’t investing and big waste companies don’t need to – they have the contracts, and they have a free workforce: us.

This is the core of the problem. We are stuck in a setup that relies on every single person in this country to cover for institutional laziness. Politicians get to claim green credentials, and corporates get to keep their costs down.

We should have machines sorting our waste. It should be collected from our homes unsorted – preferably on-demand (see CreateStreets’ reverse Deliveroo and local hub suggestions) – and then sorted, cleaned and processed by robots at centralised locations.

We can burn what makes sense for energy and recycle what’s worth recycling. Waste is a public goods question, and that means the return-on-investment must be for citizens, not all the other players. What gives us the most energy? What lowers our bills? What puts money back into our towns and cities, and means cleaner streets on recycling day?

Right now, we are paying twice: first in tax, then in time. An automated system requires investment up front but, crucially, it gets cheaper over time. Machine costs fall; human labour costs rise – and we should remember what grim work this is. Collection also becomes simpler when you don’t need five men and six bins per household.

We’re building what the state won’t.

Recycling is just one part of a fraying system, but it is symbolic. Individual decency is harvested and wasted, while common sense is buried under process and long-term investment is dodged in favour of short-term performance. This is why we started Basis: to build public services that work like they should.

We also want to see cleaner streets, less litter strewn across our countryside, and less plastic in our soil. That starts with making it as easy as possible to get materials, once used, into a recycling or energy system that actually works.

We’re backing the people fixing this. Let’s stop scrubbing tins and start sorting this out.

Build notes

We are happy to fund and help build new bin companies.
We’re also looking at shadow councils. Get in touch if you’re an operator!
Archie Hall’s “Against Equal Value” is a must-read in explaining how positive rights have crippled our public services – a terrible irony. He’s also a superb writer, so you get great substance and a joyful read.