From Yahoo:
Plans to reinstate weekly bin collections have been shelved by the Government after a row between Cabinet ministers. Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman has announced the findings of the Government's Waste Review - a cross-department examination of how to tackle waste. It contains a u-turn on the Communities' Secretary Eric Pickles' pledge to bring back weekly rubbish collections...
Caroline Flint, shadow communities secretary, said: "This latest evidence of the Government in chaos is a personal humiliation for Eric Pickles. He has spent years leading people on with overblown promises to restore weekly bin collections, despite Labour's warnings that he would never be able to deliver. The Local Government Secretary should learn the lesson that chasing headlines is no substitute for properly worked out policies to make communities cleaner, greener and better places to live."
Estimates of the costs of reinstating weekly bin rounds have been put at £140m in the first year alone...
Ho hum.
I personally am perfectly happy with fortnightly for normal rubbish and weekly for kitchen/garden waste (which is what they have where I live), others clearly are not.
But if you divide £140 million/year by 9.5 million households, that works out at a princely £14.74/year per household (28 pence/week!), which is hardly unaffordable, even in these straitened times.
I left in the rant from Caroline Flint because it is another fine example of DuckSpeak (Labour politicians seem to be better at this than Tory ones), it sounds quite fluent and sincere when she says it, but it's actually completely devoid of any meaning or relevance to anything whatsoever.
Wednesday, 15 June 2011
What's £14.73 between friends?
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19 comments:
I am mystified by how het up people get about this shit. Presumably the same people who still pine over pre-decimal money. People need to get a life - 28p a week per household might not sound like much, but it is precisely that attitude that creates the slippery slope. If every household gave me 10p a week it would be completely affordable, but it would be no more warranted than this NIMBY wet dream.
Caroline Flint, shadow communities secretary, said: "This latest evidence of the Government in chaos is a personal humiliation for Eric Pickles. He has spent years leading people on with overblown promises to restore weekly bin collections, despite Labour's warnings that he would never be able to deliver. The Local Government Secretary should learn the lesson that chasing headlines is no substitute for properly worked out policies to make communities cleaner, greener and better places to live."
I am confused as to how having fewer bin collections makes communities cleaner.
"I personally am perfectly happy with fortnightly for normal rubbish and weekly for kitchen/garden waste (which is what they have where I live), others clearly are not."
Based on our personal rubbish usage, we would easily survive fortnightly black bin (general waste) collections but in Sheffield we still get these weekly.
We put far more into the blue bin as we get through a lot of milk and the missus likes the pear cider in the big 568ml bottles, the pissy little box we have for cardboard we can fill easily within 3 days. Unfortunately for us, both of these ones get collected fortnightly. If the blue bin were a red one the same size as the black bin (as was proposed a couple years back) and the thin blue bin had remained for card/paper we would probably be managing better with it.
To have one bin wagon drive around each ward once a week is surely more efficient than 8,000 people making trips to the dump.
BNJ, the new system of waste collection may or may not be a better way of doing things (I suspect it is), but it can hardly be justified on cost grounds.
SW, yup, she bunged in a bit of DoubleThink to keep you on your toes.
You'll have to explain those colours - each council seems to use different colours, where we are:
black bin - general
green bin - kitchen and garden
blue box - glass
plastic sacks - paper, plastic, metal.
so I struggle to make sense of "blue, red, black and box".
Why on earth is this a concern of central government anyway? The frequency of bin collection should surely be something that local councillors decide.
Whe we lived in Auld Reekie our rubbish was collected twice a week, as befitted a city of flat-dwellers.
Derek, exactly.
Dearie, that's probably economic in densely populated areas, it makes less sense out in the sticks.
I'm surprised that Pickles has any need for a food waste bin...
We have:
240l green bin for landfill (bi-weekly)
240l blue bin for all recyclables (bi-weekly)
smaller bin for food waste (weekly)
240l brown bin for garden waste (bi-weekly) (N.B. I have to pay £31p/a for this on top of CT)
Personally I think the service is sensible and good value. Those living in flats with no garden can opt not to have garden waste collected and save a few quid. The current uproar is proposed closing of waste disposal centers for public access (to go business only). Compromise appears to be weekend only for public access, although I'd be happy to pay a few quid per visit. If not careful our council could face bigger bills picking up the extra fly tipping than it saves from trimming the operating costs of the waste disposal centres.
DNA: "Personally I think the service is sensible and good value."
We can argue about the finer details, but refuse collection is one of those core functions of the state which has to be done anyway, and it is staggeringly good value.
Total cost about £3 billion a year*, as far as I can see, and just imagine what a mess we'd be in if we didn't have it. The benefit outweighs the cost by a factor of almost infinity.
* Just over £100 per household.
I am living in Ireland at the moment, and we have to pay the bin company direct for collection. ALL of my waste and recycling is costing me between ten and fifteen EURO a month - that's a fortnightly alternating service of rubbish one week, then dry recyclable and food/garden waste the next... The bin gets weighed full on the way up the truck and then again when empty on the way down with the difference being the weight I am charged for. Normal bin rubbish is 15c per KG and recycling is about 4c a KG with a monthly standing charge of a few Euro for the contract.
If I am paying EUR 10/15 per month for everything direct with the bin comapny making a profit, then there is something wrong with the UK numbers to increase the frequency of an existing service.
Just about everything in Ireland (except rent) is more expensive - so I wouldn't mind betting that if a similar system was in place in the UK people would get better value than the councils are doing on your behalf.
D, that's another way of doing it, but the cost probably averages out at the £100/year per household as I mentioned above.
BNJ,
People need to get a life - 28p a week per household might not sound like much, but it is precisely that attitude that creates the slippery slope.
And how much does having recycling vans coming around every other week instead cost?
We had a service that ran just fine. It was the epitome of good public service. Everyone needs it and it's a simple thing to explain and as a result, government couldn't get easily fucked over in negotiations or locked into suppliers (like with most of their crappy IT).
If you were hippy-inclined, or just didn't like waste, you could dump the few things worth recycling in a can/bottle bank.
But no, the government had to screw it all up, make it complicated for the public. In different areas, there's different rules about separation, what plastics go where and all that. And for what? So that the government can meet an EU Tractor Production Target.
A lot of the materials just ain't worth bothering with. Plastics require treatment to produce materials that no-one knows what to do with. Fabric and food will decompose quickly in landfill. The only things worth bothering with are metals and perhaps glass, and we had plenty of options which lots of people voluntarily did anyway.
We've got councils collecting garden waste as recycling now for no other reason than to improve their recycling percentage. So, their truck is going to pump out more CO2 to take it away (rather than just putting it in a pile in your garden to compost) and all in the name of helping the environment.
JT: "Plastics require treatment to produce materials that no-one knows what to do with."
That's the clever bit - they burn like tinder, chuck 'em in an incinerator, waste gone, electricity generated, win-win.
And composting is fine if your garden is big enough, but in urban areas they aren't, so councils can chuck it in piles, tap off the heat and methane for yet more electricity generation and then give the residue to allotment gardeners.
Is this "kitchen waste" collection you have where you are expected to put UNWRAPPED waste food into some kind of slop bucket and then let it stink and fester at ambient temperature inside the house until it is collected? I struggle to think of anything more utterly disgusting.
C, where I live you get a big green bin for the front garden, and an itsy little one for use in the kitchen itself, which you can empty into the big one as often as you like.
They empty the big green bin once a week, and then they rotate between black bin one week and recycling stuff the other week.
Lot of nonsense. I'm sure we could find the 140m by reducing aid to India, fining criminals or privatising something.
It's all spin, spin, spin
It's all cheek, cheek, cheek
But it doesn't impact me
'cos my bin gets collected every week
In Wales, they do it differently. Landfill waste goes in a black bin liner and is left out once a week on the pavement/roadside for collection, as much as you like. This system works well, with only minor hiccups.
Recycling is different. Plastic bottles, paper, cardboard and metal go into an orange bag, to be collected occasionally, if I'm lucky. Food waste goes into the compost bin. If you don't have a garden, it goes in with the landfill stuff I suppose. I've been throwing all mine into the big plastic compost bin the council gave me for five years now and it's never got more than half full and I've never taken anything out. Where does it all go?
"You'll have to explain those colours - each council seems to use different colours, where we are:"
Yeah nice inconsistency with bins across different councils.
Sheffield now has:
Black bin - General Waste
Green bin - Garden Waste (but not all homes have these, riff raff areas like mine don't but nicer areas like where my Nan used to live do)
Blue bin (small & thin - FAR TOO SMALL) - Tins, glass & plastic bottles (used to be used for paper & card up until around 6 months ago
Blue box - paper/card (FAR TOO SMALL)
Red bin was just a proposal about 4 years or more ago which was supposed to be for what the thin blue bin is now used for, I think this was actually at the point when the Lib-dems took the council from Labour that this got shelved.
We were given 2 slop buckets for kichen waste use. If I remeber rightly I recycled them
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