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

Thousands of householders have been caught up in a council farce after it emerged that they are not allowed to recycle shredded paper. They are not allowed to do both thanks to councils across the UK who refuse to recycle paper that has been shredded to prevent identity fraud. They say the strips of paper mess up lorries and clog up recycling machines.

Councils in counties including Hampshire, Surrey, Northamptonshire and Devon refuse to collect shredded paper during street collections. Some claim the shredding process shortens the fibres of the material, making it hard to be reformed and one home owner was told that shredded paper would not be collected because it made 'too much mess' in the collection lorries.

Rob Bell, assistant director for environmental maintenance at Cheltenham Borough Council, defended the policy, saying, "The recycling processors will not accept shredded paper as it tends to clog their machinery. In addition, shredded paper becomes windblown when hoisted into the collection vehicle and creates a litter problem in residential streets." (Source: Mail on Sunday, Nov/06)

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