Recycling is rubbish

When I was a borough councillor, the issue of waste collection and recycling often came up with residents and I certainly heard a lot about this subject on the doorstep with candidates during the recent local elections. A scare story put about by the Lib Dems was that a decision had been taken on a change to a bi-weekly collection in Rugby when no such decision had been made and in fact the Council is currently consulting on the way forward. My own view is that if waste capable of being recycled including paper, glass, aluminium, tin, cardboard, plastic & garden waste is collected in week 1, then most familes would have insufficient other waste to need a weekly collection and this other waste could easily be collected in week 2. This would result in a weekly collection, just different items being collected on alternate weeks. So I was concerned about the article in today's Sunday Times HERE about much of the waste that residents sort out for recycling being sent to landfill. Clearly there needs to be a much more joined up approach to create a system which works. Councils have been given targets of the proportion of waste that should be recycled, and are doing what they can to hit what has been set for them, but are not taking account of what happens once the collected material is taken from them. Just another example of the inadequecies of a target based culture which has been the whole ethos of Government over the past ten years.