On Thursday I found a parcel waiting at the front door of my Wandsworth flat: a ‘free’ food waste caddy, a starter roll of compostable liners and a note from the council that deserves a place in the annals of municipal self-congratulation. Recycling my food waste, it explained, could save me “as much as £720 every year”. My leftovers would become “a sustainable power source and liquid fertiliser”. And because it is “much cheaper” for the council to recycle scraps than to bin them with the rubbish, the whole exercise “helps keep your Council Tax low”. Each of these claims turns out to be false, an evasion or a subsidy in disguise.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman never tired of pointing out. A local authority that pretends otherwise is not practising environmental stewardship. It is practising virtue signalling at other people’s expense. Let’s take the £720 first. It is not a recycling saving at all. It is a Love Food Hate Waste talking point about buying less food in the first place, describing what the average family could save by throwing away less edible food. That is a saving from wasting less, not from recycling more. WRAP, the climate NGO behind the campaign, now puts the annual cost of edible food binned by a family of four at £1,000. But the money is lost by typical household behaviour, not because food waste remains uncollected by the local council.
Separately collected food waste can indeed go to anaerobic digestion, which produces biogas and a digestate fertiliser. But biomethane from digestion is also eligible for the Government’s Green Gas Support Scheme, a tariff subsidy. A “sustainable power source” propped up by a tariff is not a free lunch; it is merely moved from domestic bills to general taxpayers. The household is thus drafted as an unpaid recycler, subject to the good Wandsworth council members that claim to be saving its constituents their own money.
Nor, to be fair to the council’s worthies, is the caddy entirely their idea. Wandsworth’s own website states that all households in the borough must have weekly food waste collections from March 31st 2026, a duty that traces to the Environment Act 2021. This was passed under a Conservative government and is now being delivered under the label of Simpler Recycling. Whitehall wrote the script; Wandsworth Council merely turned up in appropriate costume and supplied the marketing angle.
