Southwark Council has been piloting a food waste recycling scheme and fortnightly rubbish collections involving 10,000 homes for many months now. It has been undertaken on homes with direct access to its street and this type of waste collection has been undertaken – not much to learn from this. Unsurprisingly having chosen the keenest recyclers for the pilot its been a success.
At a review with the Environmental Scrutiny Committee it has been agreed to my proposals to try offering blue recycling wheelie bins – sadly only to homes in Crebor Street which feels like tokenism – and to extend the pilot to the Friern Road blocks of flats. The blue wheelie bins have been repeatedly requested from keen recycling families who generate lots of recycling and are sick of multiple blue boxes and bags. Flats because the vast majority of homes in Southwark are flats. So without including flats we’ll discover how to make a system work for such homes and never reach the doubling of recycling to 44% that the Labour administration have promised by 2014.
The other element I pushed for at that committee was to extend the pilot to all Southwark street properties ASAP. So I was delighted to see that this is now planned to happen in the Autumn to add 35,000 homes.
We then need to see how we can extend this recycling to all remaining properties. Without these remaining properties they’ll never reach 44%.
Dear Mr Barber,
I am a 75-year old council-tax payer living alone in a small house in Commercial Way with a tiny front garden in which I grow roses, clematis and a few other plants. Yesterday a blue wheelie bin appeared blocking my front path together with two smaller brown bins. So I now have 2 large wheelie bins, one green and one blue, one small black plastic box, 2 small brown plastic boxes, one green garden bag and one blue waste-paper bag. I am a vegetarian, and I hand all my weekly kitchen (vegetable) waste to my neighbour who has a wormery. I do not buy newspapers so have minimal paper to recycle, I recycle two empty plastic milk bottles a week and one or two small tins, and my remaining weekly rubbish fills just two small supermarket plastic bags which I tie up neatly and put into my huge green wheelie bin, which I have to manoeuver in and out of my garden once a week. The dustman just lifts the two bags out of my bin every week when they call. I DO NOT NEED ANYMORE WHEELIE BINS OR ANY MORE SMALL PLASTIC BOXES. I am recovering from two recent operations, the most recent being a total knee replacement and have arthritis in my other knee, my garden path is too narrow to keep a wheelie bin, and I need to safely get in and out of my front gate and also require access to my front garden, and do not want to have my front garden concreted over to turn it into a recycling bin yard, which appears to be happening to most of the front gardens around here. Therefore I have left the blue wheelie bin on the pavement in front of my house, and would appreciate it if you can arrange to have it taken away. I would add that I detest wheelie bins of all colours, I’m all for recycling, and I do recycle, but this mass distribution and proliferation of Southwark Council bins is wholly ugly and unsightly to say the very least, and for me totally unnecessary.