24 October (Part 2) - The Places meeting. Boo! Bexley council plans to charge more for a lower cost service
The final item from Wednesday’s scrutiny meeting which should be of widespread interest is the Waste Management
Strategy for 2015-2020, it’s something that affects every household. Most people
would agree that the present system, developed while councillor Gareth Bacon was
running the show, has served residents well but there are ideas around to change it.
It’s amazing how services vary from one borough to another. I know that friends
in Bromley are asked to pay £60 a year (but they don’t) to have their garden waste
removed and across the river Newham allows paper, plastic and metal to all go in
one bin but won’t take glass jars at all. They expect my 94 year old aunt to
carry them half a mile to the nearest roadside collecting point so I’m afraid
they end up in Bexley.
Recycling opportunities are increasing with better technology and along with
changing costs and taxation it is obvious that things must be reassessed from time
to time. Mr. Frizoni provided the review update.
Bexley has looked at radical proposals like separating paper from card and tins
from plastic because as a general rule separating materials at source increases
its value. The downside is that the number of bins and boxes becomes
unmanageable so such a scheme is unlikely to be adopted.
Not being able to dump the occasional bit of sheet glass along with the bottles and
jam jars is a nuisance and it is possible this could change dependent on costs and trials by
the contractor.
It has always been a puzzle to know what sort of plastic is suitable for
recycling and as my chemistry qualifications stopped at A level in 1961 I tend to
regard all plastic as being the same but apparently the hard stuff isn’t and
should go in the green (rubbish) bin. It is now possible to recycle plastic film
so it may be possible to put it in the plastics box before long.
Processing mixed garden and food waste costs £53.33 a tonne but pure garden
waste is only £30, the saving would be £444,000 a year if residents could be
persuaded to separate the food from the grass cuttings. A substantial cost
saving. It does not seem unreasonable to put residents to a small amount of
inconvenience to save that sort of money but the big question is why Bexley plans
to do that and additionally levy a hefty charge on the residents who cooperate
with their money saving scheme? The council is hoping that 30% of households will
be paying for garden waste collection by 2016.
Mr. Frizoni appeared to be talking good sense overall although he did allow
himself to talk crap for a moment or two. 10%, some 10,000 tons a year, of
Bexley’s waste is babies’ nappies. The report confirmed that Bexley is no longer
London’s No. 1 recycler.
Recycling has been a priority ever since the European Union first stuck its nose
into the subject, it must have been at least ten years ago, and I was very much
against it at the time but now I am a bit of a fusspot with the recycling. Only
this morning I ‘told off’ a visitor who threw her supermarket till receipt into
my general rubbish bin and I am still seriously miffed about Bexley council
removing all their Electrical Appliance recycling bins from my end of the borough.
The EU is probably not always wrong, vacuum cleaners over 1,600 watts may be an example. My father spent
several years of his life developing the fans in Concorde’s engine and he once saw me with a vacuum cleaner
in bits which I was attempting to mend. It boasted a 1,000 watt motor, pretty big thirty years ago but not now.
Dad knew a thing or two about fans and he said that a 1,000 watt motor spinning a vacuum
cleaner sized fan was a total waste of electricity. It could never absorb all that power.
That is a rather convoluted introduction to the next point. When Mr. Frizoni
referred to the European Union early on in his report it apparently irritated
the UKIP representative on the Committee. Councillor Lynn Smith responded with this…
Despite the vacuum cleaner anecdote I am no enthusiast for the European Union myself, far from it, but surely there is a time and place for everything? Perhaps Blackfen and Lamorbey voters should have put their cross against Mr. Barnbrook’s name instead.