All a matter of waste

One has to have some sympathy with families whose lives appear to have been turned upside down by the new recycling scheme, and who can't understand why bins for waste cannot be emptied as they always have been on a weekly basis.

The key to understanding what is going on here, perhaps, is to recognise that the focus is not really on recycling, but on reducing waste.

Recycling is one key means of doing this through preventing usable waste going to landfill.

The council's strategy is three-fold: give everyone the means to recycle (green bin/black box), reduce the capacity to get rid of waste (fortnightly grey bin collections), and hope that people adjust and get used to it.

This only makes sense if about half your waste (by volume) can be recycled.

If you continue to produce a lot of non-recyclable waste, then your waste bin is going to overflow every fortnight.

The council knows all this, which is why another reason it has stopped weekly collections of non-recyclable waste is to persuade people to throw less waste away.

The logic goes something like this:

If you've only got a collection every two weeks, and there's no room in your bin for all the waste you are still producing, then you will need to change your shopping habits and reduce your waste by changing what you buy/consume.

Faced with these difficulties, you will go on to put pressure on retailers to provide you with less packaging in the first place and they in turn will pressure their suppliers etc.

Perhaps the council should try to explain all this more clearly.

Incidentally, it is also Government policy to make what it calls sustainable living attractive to us all.

The agenda here is not about waste at all; it is about changing the ways in which we live to consume less in the first place. Fortunately for West Wiltshire District Council this is not its responsibility it seems to have quite enough problems making its recycling policy work.

W Scott

Semington