RECYCLING SCHEME

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The Council intends to provide high quality recycling services to all residents across the city during the next 2 or 3 years. The Chellaston and Shelton Lock project is a pilot scheme to test the best way of providing a comprehensive recycling service across the city. The Council will provide a twin bin, black bin and brown bin collection service, a blue box and two recycling bags. These will be collected on an alternate week basis.

Week 1 - Brown Bin

* Grass cuttings, plants and flowers
* Hedge and shrub cuttings
* Leaves and weeds
* Small quantities of soil (no more than one bucket full per wheeled bin)
* Bark and tree branches (up to 2 inches or 5 cm in diameter)

Blue Box
* Glass bottles and jars
* Food and drink cans
* Plastic bottles

Recycling Bag 1
* Newspapers and magazines

Recycling bag 2
* Textiles

Week 2 - Black Bin

* All non recycleable materials

Around 26,000 Derby homes are to be included in a scheme to increase waste recycling in the city. The scheme is to be expanded to cover south Littleover, Mickleover, Allestree, Oakwood and Breadsall. It will mean that 32,500 homes will be included, about a third of Derby households. The move comes as the council attempts to increase recycling in the city. The authority is required to recycle 33% of the city's waste by 2006, compared to 12% that is currently recycled.

Neil Haslam, the city's waste management officer, said, "The scheme's going well. It's very difficult to predict, but we're hoping that we'll be very close to the Government figures by 2006 as, subject to finances, we'll be able to extend the scheme out to another 26,000 homes in 2005." Philip Hickson, deputy leader of the city council, said, "We're focusing on this area for extending the scheme because the majority of homes will have space to put the bins and driveways, so there is access for collection."

He added, "We need to think a little bit more about the way this scheme will operate in the inner parts of the city, where there's more terraced housing and issues around storage of the bins." Meaning they haven't worked that problem out yet.

Residents in parts of Chaddesden and Oakwood are to get new wheelie bins as part of Derby City Council's Rethink Rubbish scheme. They will have the same black and brown bins that 36,000 other Derby homes in an effort to recycle more waste. The black bins are for household waste and brown bins are for garden waste and are collected on alternate weeks. But instead of the blue boxes that other properties have received to store glass, tins and plastic, the 6,000 new households joining the scheme will each receive a blue wheelie bin.

The blue bin trial is partly for health and safety reasons to protect council waste collectors, as the blue boxes can be awkward to lift. It will also cut down on the number of blue boxes individual homes are requesting and, if the trial is successful, the council will consider extending it to other areas in the city. Councillor Lucy Care, cabinet member for planning, transportation and environment, said, "It obviously means additional budget costs and there are potential downsides, mostly related to the way households respect them." She said it was not uncommon to find that residents had mixed normal waste with garden waste in their brown bins, meaning the load was contaminated and had to be sent to a landfill site.

The Amber Valley recycling and refuse scheme is already proving to be a disaster, manned by rude operators. I have been recycling for years, in Europe and in this area, long before this hare-brained scheme came into operation. The scheme was announced some time ago and the orange and yellow boxes were delivered to households. The instructions issued with it were pathetic and it is obvious that Amber Valley Council has chosen to totally ignore the biggest recycling problem of all, plastic. Almost every item that goes into a shopping basket is plastic-wrapped or packaged! The system relies on a collection of the recycling items one week followed by a refuse collection the next week.

This alternating system means that there will be a two-week gap between refuse collections. The instructions tell us which colour of box items go into, but no mention of plastic anywhere. Like most householders, my family assumed that plastic would go with other dry rubbish, such as tin foil, aluminium cans and card packaging. The operators very rudely and flatly refused to take plastic as well as card packaging. With a two-week refuse cycle, we now have the delights of a very ripe bin to look forward to, which will almost certainly be overflowing with a mountain of plastic. The blue bags issued for newspapers are now blowing freely around Heanor and Langley Mill, having been dumped on the ground after being emptied by these very rude professional operators whom we, the taxpayers, are keeping in a job!

I have lived in Germany, Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia where they have been recycling properly for more than 20 years and I have participated in schemes which were well thought-out and covered every eventuality. Sad to say, Amber Valley Council has not come up with a sensible plan and has, no doubt, spent a fortune on the plastic boxes, fliers, blue bags and the shiny new Vultures, which only guzzle what the operator interprets or deems as the correct items! To crown it all, the helpline number does not get answered, I spent the best part of an hour trying to ring them, but got no reply, so I sent them an e-mail, which, at the time of writing, has had no response. Jim Saunderson

Binmen have been told by their bosses to dump the "green" waste in with everything else. Derby City Council has admitted that in some cases rubbish which residents have painstakingly separated from their other household waste has gone into the wagons heading for landfill. This is because it has struggled to catch up after bin routes were redrawn to make them more efficient, adding another 5,000 homes to the city's kerbside recycling scheme, which asks residents to separate glass, plastic and paper from other waste.

In the first week the new system was introduced, the council received 1,200 calls about missed bins. The following week that rose to 1,600. Andrew Hopkin, the city's assistant director for environmental services, said, "In a few cases, we have had to collect blue/brown and black bin waste in the same vehicle. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the current problems we're experiencing but our priority is to make sure we catch up with the rounds."

Mr Hopkin said normal waste had only been mixed with recycled rubbish as a temporary measure and the council could not say in how many cases it had happened. He said, "Derby City Council is currently changing the refuse collection rounds to make them more efficient and cost-effective. These changes have unfortunately meant that a number of streets have been missed for their normal collections."

The authority, which collects 105,000 bins in the city each week, said it was confident the number of uncollected bins would decrease by the end of this week. A spokesman said no log was made of how many recycling bins had been emptied with black bin waste but said the priority at the moment was to get bins emptied. Labour councillor Ranjit Banwait said, "The way the rounds had been redrawn is ridiculous because it took binmen off the rounds they were used to and has created this problem."

Mr Banwait said he was furious about the current situation and said he would collect waste himself and leave it in the Council House if the situation was not sorted. Mr Hopkin said he hoped the service would be back to normal in a matter of weeks. He added, "We are putting on extra vehicles to cover these problems. Despite these early setbacks, waste management are responding to all calls across the city. We are confident the problems will be reduced when the drivers and support staff become familiar with the new rounds." (Source: Derby Evening Telegraph, Feb/10)

The city council is spending £50,000 into clearing the unemptied bins backlog and has apologised for the problems created by a complete overhaul of its collection system. It has also promised it will not happen again. It said that "it is dealing'' with the staff member who issued orders for binmen to mix the refuse in a desperate attempt to get on top of the issue of missed bins. Paul Robinson, corporate director for environmental services, said the orders had not been approved by the council and the practice had been stopped as soon as it came to light.

He said, "We apologise for the difficulties some customers have encountered as we have gone through this major change. We are working to bring back customer satisfaction levels." The council said the old bin collection system did need changing to make it more up-to-date and to cope with an extra 6,000 homes being added to its kerbside recycling scheme. It has been adding new properties to bin crews' rounds for many years as homes were built. But it meant the rounds were not evenly spread, with some crews working nine-hour days and others five hours.

On top of that, the council decided to expand its recycling scheme from the end of January but these could not be added to existing rounds which were already full, so the council reviewed its system. Mr Robinson said, "The first option would have seen 99% of residents' having the day their bins were collected changed. That would have caused chaos. We, therefore, asked for another option to be created which would mean no changes in collection day for the majority of households." The result was a system which saw 96% of households stay on the same collection day but instead the change was passed on to the bin crews who were put on to unfamiliar rounds.

It has caused delays as the staff have had to get used to new streets and rounds, meaning not all the bins have been reached on their usual days. Mr Robinson said, however, that about 99% of the 180,000 bins the authority collects each week had not been affected and that the council was doing "everything possible" to sort out issues with the remaining 1%. That includes paying £20 extra per day to staff, or £50,000 in total, for the first six weeks since the new rounds system came into operation. This pays for additional collections and extra time spent on the paperwork needed to provide management with details of areas where there are problems.

A collection system has also been brought in to empty trade waste bins which have been missed. Mr Robinson said some changes had been made. He added, "Some rounds have been tweaked with this feedback because what looks good on a computer programme sometimes needs adjusting in reality because of things like traffic playing a part in the time it takes to do rounds." It could take two more weeks for the service to get back to normal, as the council said it needed three complete cycles of the fortnightly bin collections, or six weeks from the new system's start date of January 25, to resolve all the issues. (Source: Derby Evening Telegraph, Feb/10)

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