Author: admin

The Daily Mail today carries a story about one of their favourite subjects – bin taxes. It reports that the Government is trying for push these through again after failing to attract any interest in its ‘pilot schemes’. Not surprisingly, the report is entirely negative and presents ‘pay as you throw’ as another Gordon Brown stealth tax.

Article here

I have several questions after reading this article.

• what is this ‘huge public opposition’? The media regularly whip up a storm over this and tell us that we are totally opposed to ‘bin taxes’, but I don’t actually see any real feeling that rewarding recyclers with lower Council Tax is a bad thing. Although not reported, that would have been the outcome of the DEFRA pilot schemes.
• what is the alternative? Landfill is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions whilst simultaneously wasting energy rich resources such as glass. How would the Daily Mail suggest that we divert waste from landfill now that those who are will to recycle are mostly doing so?
• what other utility service do householders receive unmetered? Gas, water, electricity, window cleaning and everything else is paid for subject to the amount used. Why is waste so different and why do we cling so tightly to being able to produce and dump as much rubbish as we feel like? I’m not actually sure that the general public is that bothered about being asked to separate out resources from waste.

I believe we are missing the point.  Householders want to have a dependable and efficient waste collection service.  In recent times many of us have had our residual waste bin collected less frequently or reduced in size to force us to recycle more.  I have no doubt that this has been done for the right reasons (to reduce landfill) it hasn’t been popular and many councils are now faced with a hostile public, despite the fact that most residents have a considerably larger total bin volume than ever before.  In part this is due to natural resistance to change but also that many items still cannot be recycled (plastics in particular) and that availability of services differs greatly from one region to another.

Councils don’t necessarily have much control over any of this.  However, they must continue to improve services, reduce costs and drive up recycling.  It’s about time the lazy media stories were replaced with a serious explanation of what ‘pay as you throw’ really means – that it is a revenue-neutral means of forcing people to send less waste to contaminate our green and pleasant land.  The happy side-effect of this is that councils will pay less for disposal and earn more for reclaimed materials, which can be passed back to you and me as savings in Council Tax.

It can’t be that hard to sell, surely?

At last, a well written, balanced and accurate assessment of ‘how recycling works’.  This should be required reading for all politicians and special interest groups who think we can just keep on shoving waste in a black bin and tipping it into the ground.

The simple truth is that we have a constant supply of a valuable resource and regularly bury large quantities of it.  Everyone (central and local government, householders and businesses) should unite to put this material back into our economy.

The Truth About Recycling

A story, first run in the Daily Telegraph and subsequently picked up by the BBC and the Daily Mail (so far) reports that Harrow’s bin men will be ‘profiling streets’ to record recycling activity, paving the way to introducing ‘pay as you throw’ waste charges.  My employer, Bartec Systems, is named as the supplier of this Orwellian technology. So, what is actually being introduced at Harrow and why? It’s perhaps useful to start with the problem that Harrow, and many other Councils, are trying to solve.

1. Landfill taxes and the general push to reduce landfill and carbon emissions mean they MUST send less waste to landfill
2. The need to collect different waste types means a more complex service with a greater need to optimise collection routes and use of vehicles and crews (imagine the workload for green waste during an August heatwave compared to a frostbitten February for example)

So, how does a council answer an enquiry from a householder who hasn’t had their bin collected and wants to know why? At present, the majority of bin crews keep paper records on a clipboard of which households have not put a bin out, have presented contaminated recycling or an overflowing bin or what have you.  The amount of paperwork created across a fleet of bin trucks (the largest UK fleet is over 100 trucks) is absolutely staggering.  Worse still, that paperwork is locked in the truck until the end of the day, at which point it lands on somebody’s desk for processing. Harrow, in common with a good number of UK councils, are adopting technology to solve this problem.  Rather than writing this information on a clipboard, the driver can enter it on a touch-screen.  This is faster and more reliable than paperwork.  It’s also much safer, because unlike paper it only works when the vehicle is stationery.  The touchscreen also gives the crew reminders about households which need an assisted collection or have a valid second bin. As a result, the crews will miss fewer collections and will consequently deliver a better service with lower costs and carbon emissions.

Harrow expect to save £3.1 million over ten years through use of this technology.  That is surely a good thing and should be supported by residents of Harrow.

Councils are constantly (and rightly) on a continued crusade to reduce the amount of waste they collect from homes and take to landfill. There are several factors in this

• the increasing landfill taxes make reduction or diversion to recycling economically essential
• landfill space is running out (although some dispute this) and alternative facilties such as waste-to-energy and incineration take a long time to implement
• landfill sites are a significant contributor to global warming due to production of methane, a more potent ‘greenhouse gas’ than carbon dioxide

Councils clearly have to persuade people to reduce their waste outputs and the most effective method in recent times has been restriction of residual waste collection.  This has been done by switching to alternate weekly collections, reducing bin sizes and enforcing stricter policies on overloading bins and collection of side waste.  All of these things reduce the volume of waste collected, and of course the first thing people do with a full bin is squash everything in tighter!

Measurement of recycling performance is nothing to do with volume, but is based on data collected at disposal site weighbridges.  This leaves Councils with a problem -it is necessary to deeply cut volume capacity to have any effect at all on weights.  These deep cuts have a strong and potentially negative effect on the Council’s relationship with the public. So far, so obvious.  But the question I have is whether weight or volume is in any way relevant?  To answer that question I have to go back to the very reasons why we wish to reduce residual waste.  The landfill tax is simply a man-made tool to pressure local government and so is not a justification of itself.  The question of available space in landfill is subject to some discussion.  And that leaves climate change and global warming as the strongest reason for our obsession with reducing residual waste.

The UK has certainly had some success in this.  Kerbside collection of recyclables has increased from almost nothing to over 50% in some areas.  But what types of waste have we diverted?  In my own backyard my recycling bins contain glass, tin cans and paper.  In the summer we send a small amount of green waste to compost, although most is composted in the garden.

My question is how much methane this has saved – I am no expert on this but I believe glass hardly breaks down at all and cans will oxidise over a very long period to rust without releasing any carbon (as methane or any other gas).   That leaves the paper, which does have a high organic content and will decompose to methane, amongst other gases, in a relatively short timescale.

This leaves a rather paradoxical situation for the waste collection authority.  If I were to stop recycling glass and put it all in my black bin then the effect on methane emissions at the landfill site would be nil¹. Perversley, under any variable charging scheme I would be heavily penalised and the Council landed with a large landfill tax bill.

It is hard to conceive of a collection scheme that can measure waste both quantitavely and qualitatively, but any justification to the public of variable charging and specifically ‘pay by weight’ which hinges on the climate change effect of landfills should address the long term changes not just to the volume and mass of landfill, but also the composition of it.

¹ This argument does ignore the energy benefits of reusing glass instead of processing sand to create ‘virgin’ glass, which is in part offset by the carbon and energy costs of the additional collection process.

It was widely reported on 1st January in the national press that in a recent survey not one Council was planning to apply for a pilot scheme.  To quote the Daily Mail “But a survey of 100 local authorities found that not a single one even wanted to take part in an initial trial run.”.

However, having looked into this a little further it is apparent that the figures are not quite as clear cut as that.  The survey asked 160 councils about their intentions.  Only 100 replied, all of them saying that they would not take part in the trials

Put another way, 63% of the Councils surveyed have said they will not take part.  We don’t know about the other 37%.  It is reasonable to assume that any Councils which are interested in running a trial (and presumably are preparing a bid now) would be very wary of the likely response from local and national media.  As a result they are likely to carefully control the way they present this to their residents and therefore hold their counsel until their application is finalised.  Likewise, those taking the undoubtedly more popular ‘no’ stance are more likely to advertise the fact early and at every opportunity.

DEFRA are seeking to run only 5 pilots (not hundreds as implied by some newspaper articles).  The results of this survey would appear to be far more encouraging for DEFRA than the national press would like to think.

Article here

It’s been fairly quiet on the ‘Council Bin Tax Killed Princess Diana’ hysteria front, and I suspect New Year’s Day was a slow news day. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the Daily Mail chose to run yet another re-hash of its opposition to variable waste charges under the guise of ‘news’.The key facts they choose to overlook are

• waste is not building up in the streets, because Councils provide a perfectly adequate collection service to every household in the UK
• people who recycle (and even relatively small amounts) will pay less to their local Council
• people who prefer to fly-tip are not an oppressed majority – they are litter louts and should be treated as criminals
• current problems with ‘stockpiling of recyclables’ are temporary due to the sudden collapse in demand
• we cannot keep shovelling huge amounts of waste into the ground

Doing nothing and blaming Local Government for all the world’s ills is, no doubt, very popular but it won’t solve the problem that the UK has been collectively avoiding for decades.  The rest of Europe has developed a culture of waste minimisation along with civic pride and responsibility for its street scene.  That’s one European import I’d welcome.

Footnote – the Dail Mail comment police still haven’t released the item I wrote on their article a week ago. Looking at the comments on there it appears that 100% of the public agree entirely with the article. Are the Daily Mail following a policy of suppressing dissenting comments?

The Guardian reports that Conservative shadow Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has threatened to expose Conservative councillors who get involved in variable charging schemes as ‘collaborators’.

I’m not quite sure what conclusions I draw from this.  Obviously domestic rubbish collection and recycling is seen as an area where the Opposition can garner significant public support; the persistent trickle of ‘bugs in bins’ stories in the press seems determined to keep this at the top of the political agenda.  But the tactic of threatening your own party members with a vote-losing public ‘outing’ seems rather odd.  Does Eric Pickles not have confidence in his colleagues in local government to represent the people who elect them and to make local decisions?

What I would really like to see is a clear statement from the Conservative party on what they would do in power to tackle this country’s dependence on landfill and incineration.  If there is an as-yet undisclosed ‘third way’ in which we can stop filling the ground with rubbish and the air with methane without having to put chips in bins and expensive equipment on the back of every bin truck then I’m sure it would be a great vote winner.

Mr Pickles – feel free to click Comment below and fill in the details….

Well, I rather suspect that someone has!

I’ve long suspected that certain newspapers and other media outlets have simply decided that waste collection is one of their ‘old faithful’ subjects that they can simply reheat every time they have a slow news day, alongside ‘who killed Princess Diana’ and ‘chocolate is good for you’ (or bad for you, depending on whatever they wrote last time).

Even so, I had to chuckle at the link between ‘pay as you throw’ and cancer! There are many reasons why people burn things in their garden (barbecues quite possibly chief amongst them for middle-class Daily Mail readers), many sources of dioxins in the atmosphere and many causes for many variants of cancers. The article doesn’t consider the negative effects of our landfill culture on the local environment and the wider carbon emissions problem. I don’t have any idea whether one outweighs the other but unfortunately this rather unbalanced article doesn’t leave me or anyone else any the wiser.

What is undeniable is that there is a common concern, particularly from the Irish experience with variable charging, that ‘pay as you throw’ will lead to environmental side-effects such as fly-tipping and waste burning. Local authorities implementing schemes must ensure that they include clear communication (supported by local by-laws if necessary) to prevent diversion of waste to illegal burning and dumping.

I’m sure the Daily Mail will be very supportive of councils who clamp down on people having illegal, cancer-causing bonfires in their back gardens!

Original article here