Rubbish performance for Lib Dems

Richard Normington has crunched the numbers again on the Lib Dems' poor performance at recycling in Cambridge.

Conservative Huntingdonshire has extended its lead over Lib Dem Cambridge in the recycling stakes according to the latest statistics.

Despite lots of hot air on global warming being produced at the Guildhall for public consumption, the figures show a different story of how the Lib Dems have let Cambridge lose the race to recycle.

Now, some 57.2 per cent of household waste in Tory Huntingdonshire is for reuse, recycling or composting. This is compared to just 41.2 per cent for Cambridge.

The Tory authority extended its 2001 lead of one per cent to 16 percent today

This poor performance is despite the city Lib Dem insistence that fortnightly waste collections are either necessary to keep up recycling rates or to save money.

The Lib Dem arguments are nonsense (see an old press release full of bluster from the Lib Dems in the name of the relevant former executive councillor, Cllr Rosenstiel).

On recycling rates: the current advice from the city council is to use the black bin for food waste in the alternate weeks in which the green bins aren't emptied. That would no longer need to be the case if at least the green bins were emptied weekly. Better service needn't mean less recycling.

On saving money: the cost of handling non-recycled waste has increased significantly in recent years due to the government's bin taxes. Fortunately the Conservatives announced that they would pull back from Labour's punitive approach and make it easier for local authorities to collect all waste weekly if they wanted to.

Blue Bins are arriving

Hopefully most residents will now be aware of the change to blue bins - delivery of the blue bins has already begun, and should be finished by Friday 20 November. You should receive your new bin some time between those dates.

These essentially will replace the black and blue boxes, and will allow all the materials that used to go in these boxes (e.g. paper, glass containers, plastic containers) plus some additional items like clean cartons to be put in the new blue bin together for recycling.

I welcome this initiative - the City Council is some way behind the better performing Conservative Councils on recycling, and this could help - making it easier to recycle, and allowing more types of waste to be recycled.

The Council has lots of information about the new blue bins on its website here. If you have any specific questions about your blue bin, then please call the Council on 01223 458628.

As a local Councillor, I am keen to scrutinise various aspects of the scheme, such as how much it costs to run, but also how the roll-out has gone, and what lessons the Council can learn for the future. If you have any feedback on the following, please let me know:

How well informed did you feel about this change? How did you find out about it - through 'Cambridge Matters' magazine? Notices on your black bin? Leaflet through your door? or was the first you knew when the new bin turned up...

A key problem for the scheme is bin storage, particularly in streets with terraced houses. Some streets won't be given a bin at all (resident can opt-in), others will be partially opt-in. Most if not all roads in Coleridge should have a blue bin delivered by default. However, on request, the Council says it will swap your bin for boxes if you don't have space, or swap your boxes for a bin if it turns out you do have space. How is this working for you?

Finally, some additional advice about the lids on the new bins. Due to the way the bins have to be stored some of the lids will not close completely straight away. This is normal, and the lids should gradually close themselves over the course of about 2 days. If there are any bins where the lids have not righted themselves by the time the main deliveries have been completed, (i.e. around November 20th) then let the Council know, but since the bins are for clean recycling and should not contain food waste, this should not cause any issues with flies.

Bring back weekly bin collections!

The Conservatives have announced that the next Conservative Government will be making money available to bring back weekly bin collections - hurrah.

We need to be better at recycling, or to be more precise, we need to reduce the amount of waste we landfill. But the right way to do that is to make recycling easier and more convenient, and to work with manufacturers and companies to reduce the waste material produced in the first place.

Under Labour, there has been a different approach - extreme nannying by making it very difficult for Councils to retaining weekly collections to 'force' people into recycling, with a whole load of more sinister bullying like micro-chipped bins and new stealth taxes and fines planned so big brother can really try to control personally what people put into bins.

For people involved in local government, in a world of bureaucracy, strategies, plans, grants, partnerships, meetings, and services frequently directed at or used by small parts of the population, it is easy to forget that for large number of people the most readily identifiable service provided by local authorities is the collection of household refuse. And many people feel that by abolishing weekly collections the service levels they experience from their local Council have halved. I welcome the Conservatives latest announcement.

Recycling Ideas

A few weeks ago now I met with some Council officers to discuss recycling performance in Cambridge, and the apparent contradiction between the City Council’s claims to be leading its ‘peer group’ of Council’s when it comes to recycling, and the fact it has fallen behind neighbouring Conservative lead Councils in Cambridgeshire like Huntingdonshire and Peterborough in recycling performance.

It is fair to say that few people find refuse collection the most riveting topic (in the list of exceptions to this, a certain City Councillor springs readily to mind) – but it is also true that for many people refuse collection is the only Council provided service they can readily identify, so when life is made harder or more expensive, residents want to know where their extortionate Council tax is going. Moving general refuse collection to fortnightly is bad enough for some people, spying on bins and fining people for not recycling causes another level of outrage.

I didn’t blog at the time on recycling with some of the huge amount of detail I picked up the other week, but Gordon Brown’s headline news today asking people not to waste food has caused me to think again about the issue. Rather than the usual Labour spin/gimmick/initiative, today’s news may be rather more meaningful for a change. One of the facts I learnt when I met the recycling officers was that the average household throws away £400 of food per year. Imagine not doing that, and saving £400 a year – a reduction in Council tax of this amount would be huge.

The trouble with recycling is that what is sensible and what appears obvious aren’t always consistent. We ship plastic chips from bottles for recycling back to China. Seems daft – except the ships may be going back empty, and China is the only place where waste plastic can be used. And on today's topic of food waste, a commentator pointed out that planning ahead – buying ingredients days in advance at the supermarket may actually cause waste if plans change and food goes out of date - better to keep the minimum of fresh food in the fridge on a necessity rather than 'may be needed' basis.

I believe the Council can and should be doing more to encourage recycling, but how should it go about this? – I have some general principles:

1.Although many residents do care about recycling, or rather reducing waste, in general local Councils care much more. This is because they have to deal with much bigger problems than fortnightly bin collections, such as where to site controversial landfill pits or incinerators, management of said facilities to reduce their toxic by-products, paying landfill tax etc – hence the disconnect between the extreme measures some Councils want to introduce and resident’s acceptance. We need to educate residents, and encourage the idea that it is a social responsibility to reduce waste where possible.

2. Carrots not sticks. We shouldn’t attempt to coerce, fine, or bully people into reducing waste and helping with recycling (we already pay enough to the Council) - it needs to be positively in people’s interests. Hence my enthusiasm for Gordon Brown’s announcement today, but with high prices for all commodities such as packaging, it should become increasingly clear that throwing away useful materials is ultimately costing people money.

3. Recycling needs to be made as convenient as possible. The current rules and sorting required are just too complex – we need to make more sorting and recycling automated and mechanised, we need to make collection of all types of recyclable materials easier for residents so that recycling is easy to understand and easy to do. Other areas are better at this than Cambridge.

4. Finally, more of the focus should be on producers of waste – manufacturers, as this is where the real progress needs to be made in reducing the amount of waste with products, and making them more recyclable. The WEEE waste directive is a step in the right direction, but it is pressure from the consumers, not the government that will move producers fastest. For example, on food products all too often consumers go out of their way to buy the pretty/overpackaged/overpriced products (for reasons best known to experts in behavioural aspects of marketing) – a product in a colourful outer cardboard wrap will outsell a bland, minimally packaged tub of essentially the same foodstuff. We need a widespread change in consumer attitude to start looking critically at how products are made and packaged, and avoiding those with excessive packaging. Campaign groups are already working on this, we need to get to the consumer tipping point that will result in real action.

I hope to be able to develop these ideas into some specific policy suggestions over the next 4 years!