Recycling warning over weekly collections
Adam Hewitt • Published 3 Jul 2010 10:00
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WEEKLY bin collections will not hit recycling rates, the borough's new rulers have insisted.
Moving back from fortnightly to weekly rubbish collections was a key Tory manifesto pledge before the election, cemented in the Lib-Con Coalition agreement with a promise to re-introduce weekly collections in "priority areas" like terraced housing.
But former borough environment leader, Labour's Cllr Paul Gittings, told councillors at their meeting last week: "I'm very concerned that it will be fatally undermined by other Coalition plans.
"Aside from the obvious unfairness of these proposed changes, I fail to see how the costs of this could be justified - up to £1m for the whole of Reading and £700,000 for specific areas.
"People will naturally get a little lazier and relax into bad habits."
But Tory Cllr Richard Willis said Labour was wrong to assume recycling rates would fall if there were more bin collections.
He added that there would still be separate black and red bins and that "the people of Reading are not stupid".
He said plenty of other councils manage recycling rates in the 60-70% range - above Reading's 35% - despite having weekly bin collections. But Cllr Gittings said few of those areas faced the same challenges as urban Reading, adding: "It will prove a disaster, both in terms of cost and in its environmental impact."
He and other Labour councillors taunted the Lib Dems, saying they had been conned by the Tories into supporting policies they opposed before the election.
But Lib Dem environment leader Cllr Warren Swaine said that because of his party's input into the Coalition, there were lots of ambitious recycling ideas "on the agenda" - kerbside glass recycling, food waste disposal and anaerobic digestion facilities to turn waste into energy.
He said the former Labour council had a "tick box" approach, caring more about Downing Street edicts on recycling than what worked best for residents.
The council has not yet set out a timetable for rolling out weekly collections, which were abandoned in 2006 in favour of alternate rubbish and recycling collections each week.
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