Rick's St Mary's Diary

I am presently doing battle with the Council for a couple of residents regarding blue bin provision. Every household in the Borough was due to receive one thanks to the Lib Dem budget amendment last year. Of course there are a few exceptions like flats, but I have a couple of house-dwellers without their bins due to a variety of interesting excuses from the Council. These include "the wagons can't fit down the roads," which didn't seem to stop the black bins being picked up before!

One solution suggested to me today was that residents use communal recycling facilities such as the Longfield Centre. This is a wholly inappropriate response. For starters this is exactly the same situation as existed before - no home-based recycling option, and residents forced to go to lots of different community facilities to do their recycling. It's also completely unsustaainable because the Council have said they're going to scale-back the communal bring-sites and have them offer different types of recycling because everyone will have a blue bin! So the forgotten few won't even have the bring-sites in a few months!

I have responded to the Council today saying that they really need to pull their fingers out here. Leaving people out of recycling is no way to encourage more people to dispose of waste responsibly. And it'll do nothing to raise the woeful figures that we currently achieve.

Rick