And nappies to you too…

The business section of the Telegraph today offers a “personal view” by Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, who argues that: It's just rubbish to put recycling on the level of a religion.

He uses as his hook, four-year study by the Environment Agency that, he writes, "has confirmed what many of us, with our back-of-the-envelope calculations, had already worked out: that disposable nappies are no worse for the environment than washable ones." From that, he goes on to explore the economic rationale of recycling, this bringing him to his conclusion that we should recycle if it is rational, not because it is a religion.

If he had been so minded, Butler could then have observed that the problem with the EU environmental policy is precisely that it does elevate recycling to the status of a religion, in the name of the great God "sustainability". This is why its attempts to create a better world will never work.

How interesting, though, that it takes a load of (soiled) nappies to identify this fundamental flaw. No so much out of the mouths of babes...