Steptoe and Son would be proud of the huge fortunes being made by the recycling industry. In the old days Steptoe had to pay precious pennies for every bit of scrap he picked. Today he is paid to take it away. No doubt he would be disappointed he is not there today to take a cut of the million and half smackers the average council spends on recycling.

Take one simple example – glass bottles – which produce no greenhouse gas and is often turned into building rubble for concrete. Yet councils are urged to spend £150 or more per tonne to collect and recycle.

Whilst there is some merit in terms of energy saved by using recycled glass, the commercial value of scrap glass is between £5 and £30 per tonne delivered to the factory – a fifth of what it costs to collect. You are spending precious diesel and increased carbon emissions while you are doing that.

What would bring tears to Steptoe's eyes would be the lucrative trade in food waste. Food waste typically costs between £150 and £300 a tonne to collect and compost. Wholesale prices for potatoes for comparison are from £100 a tonne. Waste is more precious than your average spud.

Wait for it, every tonne of food waste composted in an in-vessel composting facility requires a similar amount of garden waste for the process to work and now you know why the two are inseparable. That is two for the price of one for waste contractors. Nil to councillors.

Whilst we can all enjoy the dead humour in these transactions, many will wonder what all this is about as their council is busy cutting services they depend on such as health and social care, libraries, homes for those who can't buy their own, Citizens Advice, the list is endless.  

 Of over 400 councils in the UK, around 180 collect food waste, either on its own or combined with garden waste, 220 don't. Those who don't have known the fact that it just is not worth the cost and effort involved in taking relatively small quantities of food waste when the bulk of the material still ends up in landfill.

In the meantime members of the public who still believe they are helping Mother Earth by recycling everything they can pick up and stuff in their recycling bin, should ask their councillor what the real cost of recycling collection is and whether it makes  any difference to the environment. It surely does to my pocket. Ouch!

– Venk Shenoi, Churcham and Huntley.