Rochford District Council has just won a national award for its success in recycling:
The awards aim to reward councils and boroughs which have achieved high levels of waste reduction and that have excelled with their recycling and waste minimisation targets. The period was judged from April 2008 to March 2009 and evaluated best practice across the whole of the UK waste industry, county councils, and private industry.
Rochford District Council?s Head of Environmental Services Richard Evans added: ?The Council launched its new Maximise Recycling Scheme on 21 July 2008 after consulting with residents who have responded fantastically. The new scheme saw the expansion in the range of materials that could be collected from the kerbside, increasing the Councils recycling rates from below 20 per cent to nearly 70 per cent.?
There were plenty of problems in the first few weeks of the new recycling scheme (and even this week Chris Black had an email from a resident who has cause for complaint about how her bins are left). But overall the scheme has been a great success. So all credit to councillors like Michael Starke and Chris Lumley for working on the original specifications, to our council officers and contractor staff who work the scheme on a day-by-day basis , and most of all to the householders of Rochford District who are actually doing the recycling……
Help, the recycle (grey) bin is not big enough now. Any chance of the Council responding with bigger bins? Or weekly collections?
If my grey bin is full I put out extra recyclable rubbish in the old blue box or put by the side of the bin. They always take it.
We use the blue bin and if that overflows any extras are put by the side and they have always taken them, except when they decided to leave half of the Districts rubbish uncollected.
I used to put the blue box out with excess but they took it away and presumably re-cycled it !I think RDC deserve to be congratulated on the scheme .Anyone want to invest in a local anoerobic digester so food waste does not have to go as far as Cambridge ?
Interestingly, last week I left out a clearly marked Textiles bag for collection. When the binmen came to collect my compost bin they took the bag from the floor and placed it on top of my Recyclables bin. When they came to collect the Recyclables bin I watched the binman take the Textiles bag, lift the lid of my recyclables bin and place the Textiles bag inside!
He then walked the bin to the lorry, opened the lid, shook his head at the fact that the bag was inside the bin and proceeded to walk the bin (remember that these bags are not allowed in the Recyclables bin)back to my driveway and proceeded to issue me with a dreaded red sticker saying that they would not collect the bin as it had bag inside!!!!
I was gobsmacked and got straight on the phone to Sita and they arranged for the bin to be emptied the next day.
Do the binmen get a bonus for issuing a certain number of red stickers I wonder?
We’ve had a red sticker but 99.9% of the time its fine. Recycling is something RDC have got right.