We should recycle paper less - and avoid using our cars and heating systems instead.

By Patrick Shaw Stewart.

Well-meaning people often do things that have the opposite effect to what they intend. For example, people may avoid eating meat because they want to protect farm animals. They do not realize that if we all stop eating sheep and cows, there will be almost no sheep and cows to protect. We do not eat camels in Britain, which is one reason why there are very few camels here. If we started to eat them, a market would spring up to provide camels, and more camels would exist in Britain. (The climate is OK: I saw some living quite happily in unheated buildings in a zoo in Edinburgh on Monday.) If we stopped eating cabbages, there would be fewer cabbages. If we use and throw away disposable nappies, there will be more of them, as the chain of supply replaces those that we use. In the same way, if we use trees to make paper, there will be more trees. It will be profitable to plant and grow trees to replace those that we use. We will end up with a landscape with many trees. Conversely, if we recycle paper, there will be fewer trees.

This is particularly important because growing trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 is the most important green-house gas, and largely responsible for the global warming that has been measured in recent years. It would be far better to grow as many trees as possible to make paper. After using the paper we should collect it, and burn it to make electricity. This way, a large amount of carbon would be held in the cycle of paper manufacture and use. Paper could also be used permanently, for example for building and insulation.

We should also use paper instead of plastic for packaging, so that oil as a raw material can be conserved and replaced by wood. In the USA, brown paper bags are used instead of plastic carrier bags. In Germany, unecological packaging is discouraged by making food manufacturers pay for the disposal of the packaging that their products use. Very quickly, manufacturers changed their packaging to use the minimum of materials, especially plastic. This seems like a very sensible idea.

Unlike some of my friends, I am very worried (but not yet depressed!) about the environment. I think that huge changes are taking place in the climate, and I believe that local traffic pollution is killing thousands per year in Britain. I also think that burning still more fossil fuels will produce a new situation in the history of this planet, and it is up to those who propose it to show that it is safe. To argue otherwise is like asking people who have been made sick to prove that a drug that they are taking has dangerous side-effects before it will be taken off the market. The sane system is to ask the producers of the drug to prove that it is safe. Similarly, governments and oil companies should prove that more pollution is safe before they adopt policies that produce more pollution.

I think the main reason that people like the idea of recycling is that they think it will solve the problems of the environment without making them poorer. People rush into recycling projects without thinking about the science, or even the logic, of their actions. They hope that they can simply sort their rubbish, and that the government will solve the problems of the environment. People want to maintain their standard of living, but not suffer from changes in the environment. Unfortunately, this will not work. Our consumption of fuel is steadily rising, and recycling can have little impact on this.

The best way to contribute to the preservation of the environment is to avoid using cars, and to use as little heating fuel as possible. Burning wood is a better idea. It is a far better idea to apply your time and energy to solve the problem of how to get to work by public transport or bicycle, and to reduce the number of trips to the shops, than to concentrate on recycling. Each plastic bottle that you recycle would only be equivalent to about 1/40th of a gallon of petrol. Moreover, most plastic that is recycled ends up as a mixture of many different plastics and can only used for crude heavy things like the bases of road cones.

Recycling pure plastics is expensive. For example, even if plastic bottles are recycled, the rings that are left on the bottles when you take the lid off still have to be removed by hand. One would therefore have to recycle far more than 40 plastic bottles to save the equivalent of a gallon of petrol or fuel oil. I bought some recycled dustbin bags from my local corner store yesterday. They cost 99 pence for 10. The unrecycled bags cost 75 pence for ten.

It is far easier and much more effective to avoid buying bottled drinks in the first place, and to recycle paper in your own home and workplace by writing on both sides of the paper. We should improve the insulation in our homes, and reduce the amount that we drive our cars by a little planning. Plan the weeks menu so that we only have to make one trip to the shops per week. Use your local corner shop.