Throw the book at the bad guys…

It is not often that a tyre journalist gets to take a turn at being TV critic, but July’s Panorama documentary focusing on tyre dumping was one such opportunity. This month’s Tyres & Accessories gives the 30 minute documentary the full treatment in the UK section of the forthcoming August magazine, however the issues raised are worth discussing in more detail.

From the point at which Panorama began marketing its tyre dumping documentary with satellite footage highlighting the tyre dumps that can be seen from space, you could tell that there was story a-brewing. Dramatic rhetoric has its place in the marketing and advertising of TV content – they are journalists after all, they want to find a fresh angle on a new story and who can blame them for this? As we at T&A know well (even if our audience isn’t as big as the BBC’s), the flipside of disseminating your analysis publicly is that your conclusions can be challenged. Watching “Britain’s Biggest Waste Dumpers” you could be forgiven for thinking that the BBC’s finished product veered off the point. 

To return to the satellite footage, you could see that the BBC was intending to start up close at the sharp end of the business where consumers buy tyres and dispose of their old ones before panning out neatly to the national and then global context. It makes sense in the mind of a director, but the facts don’t always follow the creative vision of producers and to some extent the documentary and specifically its over-reliance on the consumer green-fee as the thread that drew the whole story together was an example of this. Where the Panorama team erred most clearly was when they repeatedly suggested that there was a causal link between low green fees and illegal exports and consumers paying disposal charges not getting what they pay for.

The problem is the assumption that consumers a) paid a disposal fee; and b) expected a top quality service. Firstly as Panorama pointed out at Halfords’ expense, the green fee is not a legal requirement and is in no way mandatory. Therefore if you know that not everyone is paying a green fee, how can you suggest that the green fee is being misused sending tyres to Vietnam or China as illegal exports? Then there is the fact that the demonstrable majority of those that are paying the green fee (think of any of the well known retailers you can recall) are members of the Responsible Recycler Scheme and dispose of tyres through Tyre Recovery Association members. So, the tyres most clearly connected to a green fee are in fact the ones that are most clearly linked to legitimate and legal disposal methods. 

Then there is the question of consumer expectations. There is already abundant evidence that consumers are cutting back on car maintenance, driving fewer miles, running tyres longer and compromising on cheap products. On the other hand there is no evidence the tyres Panorama filmed in Vietnam came via consumers that had been using professional businesses one could reasonably have any kind of ecological confidence in. Take one section of the market for example. Over recent years we have witnessed the estimated size of part worn sales double to around four million units, if the latest numbers are to be believed. Many of these are sold at dealers with no membership of professional bodies, no over-arching code of practice and increasingly at under-the-arches locations where consumer expectations are not likely to be very high. Did consumers pay a green fee at this kind of outlet? Was safe disposal top of the agenda? Did they have any expectations whatsoever in this regard?

The point is that the true story is more nuanced than Panorama reported. The problem with generalisations is that they implicate everyone. As I said at the start, throw the book at the bad guys, but don’t tar everyone with the same brush.