Recycling

Warwick District Council has made a number of changes to their waste collection services, which all came into effect from 1 April, so it's been in place for a month now. The local paper is full of letters from disgruntled taxpayers, and reassuring responses from Council managers. From our point of view it's been a disorganised mess, although it doesn't impact too much on our lives, given that we are a household of two and we don't produce a whole lot of rubbish.

In the lead up to the change, there was a whole lot of publicity about the new arrangements. Households would be supplied with two of the large plastic bins that can be emptied into the truck by machine, along with the 'red box' that most of us already have. One large bin would be green for all organic waste, the other black for non-recyclable rubbish. The red box is for cans, paper, plastic, glass and other recyclable stuff. On alternate weeks, either the black bin or the green bin and red box would be emptied. This sounded good - up to now I've had to take all the prunings from our garden that I can't compost down to the tip in bags in the back of the car. A big green bin would be great.

Then we received our specific instructions. We are deemed to live in an area where houses don't have enough space to keep the large bins, even though we do have enough space, so we have been given grey plastic bags instead of the black bin, and nothing for organic waste. A maximum of two grey bags will be collected each week, and our red box will be emptied once a fortnight, on the Thursdays listed in the notice.

I don't like negativity, so here's the positive angle: we don't have to buy our own black bin bags any more. The full grey bags have even been collected from the street, at least once. I put our red box outside last night just in case, even though today was a Thursday NOT listed in the notice, and it was emptied this morning, although it wasn't emptied last week on the correct date. (All the grey bags put out last night are still sitting on the pavement.)

The paper reported that the Council is pleased with the whole enterprise and it has been a resounding success, with a huge reduction in non-recyclable waste destined for landfill. This is probably because there has been a huge reduction in the amount collected, due to confusion over dates, bins and bags. But we have certainly made a greater effort to separate out cans and plastic to add to the glass and paper that we were recycling before. So that's a good thing.