IF YOU live in Barnet, North London, the unexpected knock at the door could soon be a sign that Big Brother is watching your every move. Drop that wine bottle or the old Yellow Pages into your wheelie bin, and the waste police (sorry, “recycling assistants”) will be at your door to rummage through your rubbish. First they warn, then they fine you £1,000 for crimes against the environment. The authoritarian puritans are at the garden gate and they mean business. It sure is grim up North London. But don’t scoff — it could be Barrow or Banff next.

Yet much recycling is ideological rubbish, a monumental waste of effort. And this is not just the view of free-market economists who see such “socialised systems of residual management” (rubbish collection to you and me) as market distortions. Both Valfrid Paulsson, the green guru and former director-general of Sweden’s environmental protection agency, and Soren Norrby, the former campaign manager for Keep Sweden Tidy, argue that the whole concept of recycling household rubbish is a mistake.

They observe that “protection of the environment can mean economic sacrifices, but to maintain the credibility of environmental politics the environmental gains must be worth the sacrifice”. Used bottles and glass cost twice as much as the raw materials, while recycling plastics is not only uneconomic, especially when oil prices are low, but often impossible — plastics coming in so many different chemical guises. Even paper recycling uses valuable energy and chemicals, with a strict limit on the number of times fibres can be recycled.

The Barnet-style fine is thus a highly dubious tax on our time, not to mention on our pockets — it’s us who have to carry out the unpaid work of sorting and cleaning the stuff. You will also notice that the policy puts the onus on us, the unwitting consumer, who already forks out income tax, VAT, council tax, and a wide range of other fines and duties.

We don’t ask for the Yellow Pages to be pushed through our door in a plastic bag. We don’t want all that packaging at the supermarket. And why should we spend ages trying to work out how to recycle batteries and water filters when the manufacturers don’t bother to inform us? Above all, the impact nationally of domestic waste — our waste — is minuscule compared with that from other sources.

Britain produces more than 400 million tonnes of waste a year, 93 per cent of which comes from agriculture, industry, commerce, construction, dredging and mining. Only 28 million tonnes derives from households and only a small proportion of this has a market for the recycled product.

How many of us have religiously washed out that green wine bottle, travelled miles by car to our nearest recycling centre — with all the environmental downsides associated with such short journeys — only to find that the holes are full to overflowing with sticky, half-smashed bottles? It is galling to discover that the UK has a green glass mountain. Despite trying to use this in road building, some 80,000 tonnes of crushed green cullet has to be exported to places such as South America to avoid being dumped in landfill — hardly great news for those worried about the effect of long-haul exports on global warming.

SO WHAT SHOULD we do about the waste police and their command-and-control EU recycling targets? First, we should be told precisely what happens to all the so-called recyclable material, from aluminium to zinc. Then it would be instructive to see a detailed costing of domestic recyling, including hidden savings on landfill tax, subsidies, fines, and collection costs. Many residents will discover that these can top £17 per household.

There are other, human, costs. One Scandinavian study shows that recycling schemes may cause respiratory tract problems in staff. Moreover, does recycling replace all the jobs involved in virgin production, especially in less developed countries?

There are even more fundamental questions you may ask. Why is it that the consumer has to pay, when you could argue that it is the manufacturer who is responsible for waste production? Is there a market for the recycled product? Who says landfill is bad? And why don’t bottles go back to manufacturers any more? It’s time to dump ideological rubbish and to put punitive, moralistic schemes like that in Barnet back in the green sack.

The author is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London.

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