Is our council really trying to save the planet one plastic bin at a time or is it just putting up a green-tinted smoke screen?



Since being elected in May this year, I can't remember the last time I met people, who weren't part of my immediate family, who didn't berate me about our Council's ABC scheme. Come to think of it this does also include my immediate family. The conversation usually starts with the "so what are you going to do about the bins?" to which I usually quip, "that depends on whether you voted for me?" something which I almost always regret saying.

Once past this familiar opener we usually come to some sort of loose agreement that, despite its many flaws, the scheme has started to change our collective attitude about recycling. Making a daily decision about what can or can't be put into the dizzying array of bins that have become an intimate part of our lives could be the start of something positive.

However, the price we are being asked to pay for this less than gentle coercion has been the need to park our smelly, maggot infested bins as far away from our house as possible, and only very few people around here have front gardens that big to make this a truly effective strategy.

Most of us recognise that the days of us just throwing rubbish away are long gone. Next year Hertfordshire completely runs out of landfill space whilst at the same time landfill taxes are set to rise significantly. To keep on just dumping stuff in landfill is rapidly going to get very expensive. And let's not forget about trying to help save a bit of the only planet we've got right now.

So what should we do? I've been talking through some of the options with a good friend of mine, Sam Russell, who specialises in this area (and someone you'll get to hear about a lot more over the next months).
Essentially, recycling schemes always fail when they don't have the support of the people to whom they are applied. Efficient and effective recycling schemes take time and a lot of effort to work.

It may actually annoy some of you to learn that there are Councils quite close to us whose real recycling rates are almost 50% and where the residents really like the ABC scheme. I think one of the main reasons our ABC scheme has been unsuccessful is because it principally failed to gain the support of the people it was supposed to serve. Council officers have a difficult job of trying to deliver the best service they can within the imperfect system our local politicians have given them. The latest Best Value Performance Indicators show that out of Hertfordshire’s 10 district councils, Hertsmere is not faring well with regard to public satisfaction in our waste collection and recycling facilities. Should this be screaming to the council that you are not happy?

I'd much rather we moved back to the relative sanity of weekly collections of household waste, with a much more progressive program of fortnightly collections of other recyclables.