Expressing irritation: more media complaints

It seems that ill-founded negative stories about recycling have become something of a staple for certain sections of England’s press. However, when I read the rubbish written about resources, I have a hard time letting it go, which is turning me into a bit of a serial complainer – not a role I rejoice in, although I hope it’s a useful one. Having previously persuaded the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph to withdraw articles, the latest titles to incur my ire were the Sunday and Daily Express.

Tonnes of rubbish

Back in January, the Express took a look at the latest local authority recycling figures and their eyes lighted upon the stats for recycling rejects, and came up with an exciting headline: “Scandal as 280,000 tons of recycling ends up as landfill”.

The Sunday Express carried a news item which summarised their case:

“About 280,000 tons of plastic and paper put into eco-friendly bins was treated as ordinary household waste last year because it was labelled “contaminated”.

The drive to recycle more rubbish is being hampered by people who put the wrong items in bins, forcing re-processing plants to turn away waste lorries.

Critics believe householders are confused about which items go in which bins.”

That inspired a comment piece from Ross Clark in the Daily Express the next day, who had a good grumble about how hard it is to understand what counts as “hard plastic”,

“In spite of the fines and the vast number man-hours spent by householder sorting rubbish, councils are still blaming us for the astonishing amount of recyclables going to landfill sites.

They say that recycling is rejected by factories because it is contaminated.

In the London boroughs of Newham and Hammersmith and Fulham, 20 containers are rejected for every 100 accepted.”

Clark threw in a few inexplicably inaccurate claims for good measure – apparently there are only “one or two” MRFs in the UK, and green activists have put paid to the construction of incinerators. I still can’t work out where he got these ideas from.

Burden of proof

The Express group didn’t participate in the old Press Complaints Commission system, and gave short shrift to my one previous attempt to complain to them directly. Although its titles have come on board with the new Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the time and effort involved in some of my previous complaints gave me a little trepidation about the weight of the task I’d be taking on in challenging them.

If only the Sunday Express had reflected a little more on what recycling reject figures actually mean. Photo by Martin Deutsch (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It didn’t get off to a good start – using the Express’s online complaint form elicited no response at all. However, when I got in touch with the paper via IPSO the contrast with my previous experiences with the Daily Mail was marked.

The Express’s reading of the Defra statistics was both misleading and mistaken, and to their credit they were reasonably quick to accept this, at least in part. However, they inexplicably clung on to parts of their story that were obviously wrong, resulting in the whole thing being drawn out for several months.

A number of mistakes…

The first concern I had was simply that they had used a big number without context, and that this would perpetuate the disturbingly prevalent myth that separating your recycling is pointless. Setting the 280,000 tonne reject tonnage against the overall figures for household recycling, around 10m tonnes, would present a rather different picture: “Scandal as 97% of recycling is, um… recycled”.

However, they had also failed to understand what the rejects are and where in the process they arise. Not bothering to investigate too closely, they decided that rejects must mean whole loads of recycling rejected by reprocessors due to the odd bit of misplaced material – and that the cause must be confusion amongst residents confronted with an array of multi-coloured bins.

In fact, most of the material recorded as rejects is non-target material that is sorted from amongst mixed recyclables once they have been accepted into a Materials Recycling Facility (MRF). Therefore relatively little of it should be recyclable, at least within the constraints of the MRF’s operational parameters. Pointing this out, I asked the Express to remove the claim that the 280,000 tonnes was “plastic and paper”.

Diagnosis: MRF

Since the Express hadn’t understood the numbers, their diagnosis of their cause was bound to be off, too. Naturally enough, since the majority of rejects arise from MRFs, they are primarily found where authorities collected most of their recyclables mixed in one large bin, not where they ask residents to source separate.

Indeed, even a rudimentary bit of checking by the Express would have established that the “worst offenders” they identify collect a lot of their material co-mingled, while Newcastle under Lyme, singled out in the Ross Clark piece for asking residents to sort into too many containers, reports no rejects at all. But evidence is clearly irrelevant when you’ve already decided what you think, so the paper simply published its unsupported conclusions.

As a result of the complaint, the Express has removed Ross Clark’s comment article, and deleted most of the erroneous sections of the original “factual” piece – without IPSO needing to formally investigate. I couldn’t get them to ditch the headline, and my past experience of IPSO suggests that they’d be unlikely to rule that a newspaper wasn’t entitled to call a particular state of affairs a “scandal”, particularly if the facts are presented in the article. I was also unable to persuade them completely that MRFs are the source of most rejects, although they did at least revise the statement that rejects are wholly composed of recyclable material.

This is another example of recycling getting a negative press based on preconceptions and misunderstandings rather than facts. Thankfully it has proved a little easier to get fixed than some, but remedying problems after the fact is less important than trying to address the received ideas that many of our newspapers seem to have about recycling. With any luck, this latest exercise has helped to change thinking a little at the Express – but when received opinion is as deeply rooted as it seems to be in the case of recycling, don’t be surprised if I’m back in touch with IPSO again before long.

Wish me luck…

There was a lot of e-mail correspondence on this one, but for the very interested reader, here are a couple of the letters I sent where I set out my concerns. Under IPSO rules, I am not permitted to share the responses I received.