Recycling gone mad!

I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.

I think I’m pretty good at recycling compared with the people who live in my street. I used to glance left and right as I put out the rubbish and recycling separately and pride myself that I had so much to recycle and so little rubbish (and then worry a bit about all those wine bottles on display). Now we have bins, I can’t tell how we are all doing. Almost certainly, my street has not caught up with the average Swiss street which recycles about half of all domestic waste.

Burning fossil fuels taps into the energy stored in plants and animals that were alive millions of years ago – that’s what coal and oil are. Wouldn’t it be better to use plants growing now, get the energy from them, re-grow the crops, re-trap the carbon dioxide and simply recycle the carbon round and around and around? Fuel recycling, or biofuels?

It is a good idea in many ways, but it just doesn’t work out well in practice. Growing crops for fuel uses lots of energy in manufacturing fertilisers and pesticides, then there is the vehicle use in planting harvesting and transporting crops and there are other inefficiencies in the system.  Probably more important though, is that the fertilisers we use are a potent source of nitrous oxide – a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and when that is taken into account then biofuels don’t do very well at all.

However, it gets worse. Growing biofuel crops takes lots of land – just like growing crops for food. We hear that we must grow more food to feed the world, and although that is a somewhat simplistic view (see article of 10 June) biofuels and food production compete for land and too much biofuel production will increase food prices.

However (again), it gets worse still. On a crowded planet with little spare productive land, the temptation is to go and chop down some forest and plant either food or biofuels on that land ignoring the shared ecosystems service that those forests provided (see article of 7 June).

If a farmer, whether he (or she) be in Iowa or Ipswich, grows fuel instead of food the world doesn’t say ‘I’ll go for a drive instead of eating’, it still demands its meal. Food and fuel are global commodities so that farmer’s action may persuade someone in Indonesia to cut down some more rainforest. And rainforests are such great carbon stores that the maths show that you only need tiny increases in rainforest destruction to wipe out any carbon savings from biofuels, and indeed to put yourself in carbon debt. In the worst case, if you chop down a rainforest to grow biofuels you may make money, but you don’t recoup the lost carbon for about 80 years.

But governments fell for the allure of biofuels and now, every time you fill up your car with fuel in the UK, that fuel has a splash of biofuel in it, and that biofuel will, whether it was grown just down the road or on the other side of the world, have hastened the destruction of rainforests and the wildlife that they support. And it won’t have reduced your carbon footprint very much, or maybe even at all.

Remember that when you fill up, you really may be putting a tiger in your tank, and in Brazil the boom in bioethanol production threatens the wildlife, carbon stores and productivity of the Cerrado.

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Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference.  His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB.  Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.