Despite the best efforts of the BPF and Pafa the government has pressed ahead and set ‘impossible' recycling targets for plastics.
What next, I wonder? Perhaps the coalition would like to mandate the creation of a perpetual motion machine and antigravity paint, too, while it's about it? After all, it seems to believe that just because something's impossible that doesn't mean it can't be done.
At a time when recycling should be becoming a non-issue – it's already happening after all – it's back on the top of the plastics agenda… for all the wrong reasons. What should be seen as a success story has been converted into an imminent failure by a government that simply doesn't get the facts.
But just you watch – UK plastics will be criticised for not meeting the new recycling targets; labelled tardy and uncooperative and all because it couldn't do what it said it couldn't do because it's currently impossible.
It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland.
"There's no use trying," Alice said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
The government appears to be in the same state of mind.