Paying for beauty
Above: Paying for beauty
Rubbish Collections
Sussex Life
Words by Nancy Cremore
The issue
OUR once relied upon weekly bin collection may be cut to once a fortnight and in some areas this has already been done. On top of that, the Government is thinking of fitting microchips to bins so they can monitor, and eventually charge us for, the rubbish we throw away.
More than a third of councils in the UK have already switched to fortnightly collections.
Arguments for
• The thinking is that by cutting collections, recycling will increase as people will fill their recycling boxes once their normal bins are full. A Local Government Association (LGA) study carried out in April this year would appear to back this up: It found that councils which have switched from weekly to fortnightly collections have a higher recycling rate at 30 per cent, compared with 23 per cent for those that had not switched.
• Fitting microchips to bins also gives an economic incentive to recycle and so cut down landfill waste. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, in European countries such as Germany, where they charge 18p per kilo for waste that isn’t recycled, 58 per cent of waste was recycled in 2003-04, compared with just 18 per cent in the UK where there is no such incentive.
The chips carry information about which address the bin belongs to and the weight of rubbish in each bin is measured by equipment installed in collection trucks. Sandra Issar, spokesperson for the LGA, says: “The chips are just electronic versions of the barcodes already on the bins, which match up the bin to the house.” It is a ‘dormant’ chip. However, in some areas, if the dustcarts have the relevant technology, they are able to weigh the bins. Sandra Issar says this is to “monitor areas where recycling is low and offer advice and encouragement where needed”.
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Recycling’s advantages are well known: It uses less energy therefore causes less pollution; it reduces the demand for virgin resources; reduces the amount of waste put into landfill (West Sussex County Council say there is less than 10 years left before we run out of landfill space in the county); reduces landfill tax (currently at £24 per tonne, West Sussex County Council landfills about 350,000 tonnes of waste a year). Plus, we have a legal requirement to recycle:
The EU has imposed a 40 per cent recycling target for household waste by 2010, with fines if this is not met. At the moment we recycle only 18 per cent, with only Greece and Portugal recycling less (the Netherlands recycle 65 per cent).
Sussex focus
- Five councils: Wealden, Chichester, Rother, Hastings and Mid-Sussex, have already implemented fortnightly landfill rubbish collections.
- Three councils: Rother, Hastings and Mid-Sussex, have introduced microchips to bins, but they say these are for ID purposes only.
- None of the other councils say they plan to introduce microchips in the near future.
Arguments against
- Bad smells, maggots and vermin. In 1875, the Public Health Act included legislation that domestic waste had to be collected every seven days. This was to interrupt the life cycle of the housefly – seven to ten days.
- Some say the two are not mutually exclusive, so recycling can still be increased with a weekly rubbish collection in place.
- Litter and fly tipping may increase. In a BBC news interview in May, Bill Bryson, now president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, expressed concern that fortnightly rubbish collections could cause more litter.
- Some fear large families will pay more with microchipping...
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