From the BBC:
Controversial four-weekly bin collections will be rolled out across a county on Monday - the first area in England and Wales to make the move...
It has been met with controversy, with residents and councillors calling it "unfair" and claiming the trial brought more rats, seagulls and flies. Conwy council said it had addressed concerns and it could save £390,000.
Many parts of the UK are now moving towards three-weekly bin collections in a bid to cut down on residual waste and increase recycling.
Conwy County Borough has 116,550 residents, so about 50,000 households.
Divide £390,000 (let's assume this is an annual figure) by 50,000, that's £7.80 per household, or about 1% of their Council Tax bills. Not clear if they are moving from two- or from three-weekly collection to four-weekly, but it works out at 60p or £2 per bin collection.
So clearly, cost savings are not the motivation:
Conwy County Borough say:
A year-long trial showed that putting recycling at the heart of the service has really paid off, with residents’ recycling more than ever since their refuse collection went to 4 weekly...
The service change will mean that all Conwy residents will have:
* a weekly collection for food waste;
* a weekly collection for paper, card, Tetra Paks, cans, aerosols, foil, glass bottles and jars, plastic bottles, tubs and trays and batteries;
* a fortnightly collection for green waste, textiles and small electrical waste;
* a refuse collection every four weeks; and
* a weekly nappy or incontinence products collection for those who need it.
So in defence of the council, you should only be putting "stuff that doesn't rot" into your four-weekly bin anyway. Where I live, they empty the green bin (food and garden waste) weekly and alternate between the recycling and the black bin (general waste), so the black bin is emptied once a fortnight.. Our black bin is hardly ever more than half full, and probably never more than half full two fortnights on the trot, so in theory, four-weekly is just about do-able (depending how big the bins are).
Going against the council is the fact that they are already spending all that extra money (rightly or wrongly) doing all the weekly collections. Ultimately, they are relying on people's public spiritedness to put the right stuff in the right bin and not in the general waste; only picking up general waste once every four weeks has a purely punitive aspect to it.
That is the spiteful bit. It's not just the naughty people who put food waste in the general waste bin who are being punished, their immediate neighbours suffer too.
Jammy
2 hours ago
10 comments:
It used to bother me when I lived in London at stupid-per-square-foot prices that so much space had been nationalised by edict for recycling. Instead of dumping it in the annual BAU quarries and relandscaping, London instead quarried under their houses to convert basements!
I think that people would need to feel confident that 'recycling' is actually servicing a purpose, rather than just ticking an arbitrary target, now that exporting the waste to China has stopped just for some other country to take payment for it and burn it or dump it in the sea.
I wonder if all this enforced home sorting activity is in GDP figures... Normally the Green lobby boasts about creating jobs, but this policy presumably destroys jobs.
Perhaps the council could work every other day in the same spirit.
@MW
Where I live you have to pay for the green bin, or take it to the tip using your car.
OTOH, most so called recycling is no such thing, it's all an act.
Sh, that is fucking insane!
"most so called recycling is no such thing, it's all an act."
Yup, virtue signalling. We should be recycling less and re-using more.
B, I didn't want to say "virtue signalling" but yes, that's exactly what it is. Plastic in oceans = bad, common sense says "incinerate the stuff to generate electricity or heat, it's as good as oil".
I'm a convert to small bins and infrequent collections. In London I used to dump everything in my weekly-collected 240-litre bin; carpet offcuts, underlay, jars of jam past their 2 year safety period and managed to fill it every week. Here in Austria it's 80 litres a fortnight, with bags collected every 10 weeks for mixed plastic and cans, and a 240l collected every 10 weeks for paper and card. Food waste goes in the compost. It works well, largely due to an obedient and co-operative population that punishes deviance.
And as I feel obliged to point out from time to time, there's no shortage of safe (dry) landfill in the UK. We quarry more stone than we produce refuse. The Landfill tax is an EU-wide measure that has no relevence in the UK - roll on the chance for some sensible thinking on waste post-Brexit. Filling an ex-roadstone quarry with plastic waste and old tyres and restoring the land to its pre-quarry contours with fields and cows on top is surely a good thing? Given the stste of the oceans, I'd even argue that dry landfill is actually the REAL sustainable option..
R, agreed on both points.
1. Pre sorting your waste is no biggie once you are used to it.
2. Others have also made the land fill point, I'm sure it's correct.
"Pre sorting your waste is no biggie once you are used to it." It's no biggie to more-or-less try to get it right for adults, but my council puts bossy warning stickers on the bin if you get it wrong. My children try. e.g. Pringles seem cardboard to them, but it has silver foil on the inside and is unrecyclable. For many things I am supposed to peel off the thin plastic film on the top to throw away, but recycle the plastic tray. Other things say 'refer to the recycling policy in your area.'
So either the recycling policy is not very strict, which makes the 'product' unusable other than for burning so this is all just virtue signalling, or the council policy is very strict, which certainly makes the obligation a "biggie"
Test your knowledge:
Recycling cardboard - should you remove all the sticky tape?
Cooking oil - do you pour your cooking oil into a plastic bottle and place it in your food caddy, or absorb it in newspaper and dispose of in your caddy?
Wrapping paper - recyclable?
Unused tissues - recyclable?
Black plastic plant pot - recyclable?
There are 50 types of plastic, but only 6 are labelled. Which of those labelled 1-6 can be recycled?
Can triggers can be left on cleaning product bottles and pumps on soap bottles?
MW, since oil is overwhelmingly used for transport fuel these days (as it's too expensive to burn in power stations) would it not make more sense to chemically process plastic into petrol and/or diesel fuel?
OTOH, good one, see next post.
GC, from what I know about chemistry, that doesn't make sense. It takes energy and effort to convert low value oil into high value plastic. Expending more energy and effort on converting it back to low value oil makes no sense. if they can't melt plastic down and re-use it, they might as well incinerate it and generate electricity.
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