Disappearing APIs and non-recyclable plastic. What links these two issues?

What do bees and recycled plastic have in common? They’re worlds apart, yet both face the same problem – even if it seems a bit absurd. Let’s take a look. ‘Bees are disappearing,’ says a Greenpeace advert that’s played relentlessly during every interval of every tennis match. Is there a change of ends? The bees appear, accompanied by a little girl and her grandmother, who together reminisce about the good old days when the bees, with their buzzing, brightened up summers and holidays. But the bees are no longer there because they are dying in the fields, poisoned by the many chemicals being used. Consequently, if we want pollinating bees, we must put an end to the use of chemicals in agriculture.

As I’m a very modest beekeeper, I’ve come to a different conclusion. Bee populations are declining because there aren’t enough beekeepers. Honeybees aren’t just wild creatures that you set out and then pop by every now and then to collect the honey. No, they need to be looked after, cared for, sometimes treated with medicine and sometimes fed. They need to be defended against attacks from other insects, and so constant vigilance is required. But apart from the passion and the self-indulgent pleasure of giving locally produced honey to friends, if you wanted to keep bees as a job, you’d discover that honey sells for just a few euros wholesale, and making a living from beekeeping is practically impossible. Add to that foreign competition and imported honey from countries where labour costs far less. So nobody wants to be a beekeeper any more; there’s a shortage of bees because nobody keeps them, and nobody keeps them because they’re not very profitable. When there’s a shortage of honey – if there ever is one – and prices rise, the beekeepers and the bees will return, along with the grandmothers and their granddaughters.

And what does recycled plastic have to do with it? We’ve been sorting our waste for several years now; in fact, we’ve now set European records. If you read the newspapers, leading figures in Italian environmentalism will tell you that this isn’t enough, that we need to do more and do it better. But unfortunately, plastic, like honey, is very expensive to collect and then process into recycled material, and those who could use it prefer to buy virgin plastic, which, as well as being virgin, also costs less and is imported in large quantities from other countries. Local authorities are suspending separate waste collection because recycling centres won’t accept the waste as they don’t know who to sell it to. Consequently, it piles up, posing a fire risk and breaching various regulations. In Europe, a target has been set: at least 65 per cent must be recycled. But, of course, no one asked whether there was sufficient demand for all this stuff. And so here we are with a surplus of collected material. There is an alternative: using the surplus plastic waste as fuel to generate energy. But as this would be a simple and practical solution, it has sparked the ire of environmentalists in the restricted traffic zone (ZTL). Never! And so here we are in a proper dead end – a costly one at that – with local councils at a complete loss as to what to do.

So here’s what APIs and recycled plastic have in common. For a while, you can do things out of passion, perhaps even throwing caution to the wind. But in the end, since we’re talking about economics and not charitable works or Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, the figures have to add up. Doing useful things is certainly wonderful. But if there’s no financial incentive, it won’t last long.