Why make us pay when we'd gladly recycle?

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Take a look at the Albert Hall next time you pass by. Then think of this. Every hour of every day we throw out enough rubbish to fill the imposing edifice right to the top of its baroque dome. Each of us produces, on average, half a ton of household waste a year: 28 million tons for the country as a whole. Every family throws out six trees' worth of paper annually: London bins the equivalent of the growth of a forest its own size. Five out of every six glass bottles and 39 out of every 40 plastic ones go out with the trash.

And the bins are getting ever fuller. By 2020, the official Environment Agency estimates, we will be producing more than twice as much rubbish. On present trends, we would have to find up to 2,000 more big holes in the ground to put it in. For 85 per cent of our rubbish goes to such landfill sites, far more than anywhere else in Europe.

It can't go on like this - and it won't. A new European directive will greatly restrict the amount of waste that is dumped in the ground. There's a lot to be said for it: landfills eventually leach poisons into the ground, where they may contaminate drinking water - and they brew vast quantities of methane, an even more potent cause of global warming than carbon dioxide. But it is plunging Britain into crisis.

Michael Meacher, the environment minister, warns that if the amount of waste continues to grow at the present rate, we shall have to find new ways of getting rid of 33 million tons of it a year in just 14 years' time. The prospect is causing panic in Downing Street. And the panic has produced the controversial proposal, reported in the Evening Standard yesterday, that families should pay to have their rubbish collected, in an attempt to boost recycling.

Almost everyone agrees that recycling is a large part of the answer. The other major alternative to landfill, burning the rubbish in incineration plants, is looking less and less attractive amid fears that the dioxins emitted in the process will cause cancer.

Last year, London's official Waste Management Strategy came down against incineration, citing "the widespread concern about the impact on health". Yet Mr Meacher admits that Britain's recycling record is "frankly pathetic". He can say that again. The Conservative government pledged that a quarter of Britain's rubbish would be recycled by 2000, and 40 per cent by 2050 - a target the then Labour opposition denounced as "modest in the extreme". But now, in 2002, we are recycling less than 10 per cent of it.

This means that we have one of the worst records in Europe - or anywhere in the developed world.

Switzerland already recycles more than 40 per cent of its rubbish, the Netherlands 39 per cent, Austria 34 per cent and Finland 30 per cent. Even the United States, scarcely a green mecca these days, manages about a quarter. Britain's performance is a disgrace.

The Downing Street proposals envisage households being charged £1 a sack - or £5 a month - for any rubbish they put out above a free allowance of one or two bags. This sort of scheme has worked in the United States, where it has been dubbed "pay-as-you-throw".

The towns of Dover, New Hampshire and Crockett, Texas, for example, cut rubbish by a quarter in five years after charging was introduced. Eleven of the 17 US towns with the best recycling rates have similar systems.

It also fulfils the Polluter Pays principle, one of the basic tenets of pollution control, which lays down that those who cause a problem should pay to resolve it.

But, of course, we already pay for the dustmen, through the council tax. Being forced to pay twice is likely to lead to people resenting the extra charge, and finding ways of avoiding it - such as by flytipping their waste. And, of course, it is likely to hit young families and poor communities particularly hard.

It is all too typical of a nasty feature of this Government: penalising the public for its own failure to solve a problem. It resembles efforts to charge motorists for using their cars before adequately improving public transport. And it immediately follows the announcement by the laughably named, ludicrously incompetent Consignia to charge more than £700 a year for the prompt delivery of post.

Worst of all, it is being advanced before the Government has made the slightest effort to capitalise on our enormous willingness to recycle, without being forced to do so.

Ninety-six per cent of Britons tell polls that they support recycling, and 87 per cent would do more of it if only their councils would bother to pick up the waste.

When local authorities do take the trouble, recycling rates soar. An Environment Agency survey found that the proportion of people recycling plastic packaging rose from six per cent to 59 per cent when their council provided special containers and collected it from their doorsteps.

Castle Morpeth in Northumberland recycles more than a third of its waste - far short, admittedly, of the 80 per cent achieved by the town of Bluewater in Ontario, Canada, but still far above the national average. And - in case it seems merely a middle-class preoccupation - 60 per cent of the residents of a poor Hackney high-rise willingly participated in a pilot programme.

So, before leaping at penalising us - and risking a backlash - Tony Blair and his ministers should give us a chance to recycle willingly. If this does not work, or a minority refuse to participate, that will be the time to consider charging.

Unfortunately, the performance of successive Governments on the issue does not inspire confidence. For if you were to ask of their waste policy, "What do you think of it so far?" there is only one honest answer. "Rubbish!"

? Geoffrey Lean has just won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.