I don’t think “enforcement” is a practical solution

Oh it absolutely is, increase the fines significantly so those caught pay for the enforcement and clearing up the fly tipping. Use the increased revenue to fund more enforcement. The polluter pays. Unfortunately we don’t have the will power to tackle this properly, same goes for road traffic offences, everyone moans about others who break the law and then moan about the speed van bejng purely revenue generating.

On the bring collections, they should all be removed, hang over from a past age. Recycling centres however have gone backwards with the charges for inert waste which has led to a direct increase in fly tipping. Doing a bit of tiling, what do you do with waste, a skip is overkill but to dispose of a bag of waste is £3. In the wheelie bin it goes which increases landfill costs, inert waste doesn’t burn. A bag of clean sand for B & Q is £2, less than it would cost to bin it ironically. Covid has also been a massive excuse to restrict access to the center which are invariably outside, another example of council inability to think straight.

Councils still waste ridiculous amounts of money through poor governance and whimsical schemes that never see the light of day but eat up millions in consultation. Yes they’ve definitely had funding cuts but they are so inefficient, and that starts at the top with councillors and senior officers.

With regards to the enforcement not being a great idea, I kinda have some sympathy with that angle. My council occasionally announces that it was successful in bringing a prosecution against some flat bed driver for dumping tyres and mattresses etc in a local verge. Fine £200 cost of barrister £5000.

Ive seen this a lot, whats the point? The council still had to pay for the removal itself.

A lot of the charging for dropping at recycling centres seems counter productive to me. If the council or company running the place can realistically turn a profit on selling the recyclable stuff (garden waste for composting and bio fuel, bricks and stone for hardcore for house/road building) why wouldn’t they accept commercial waste? Surely that would outweigh the costs of barristers for the 5 prosecutions a year they seem to carry out (against the hundreds of fly tipping cases)

I saw the piece on BBC breakfast this morning about using CCTV to collect data on people chucking rubbish out of car windows.

For a comparison and to underline my point of a lack of joined up thinking we are no longer permitted to put organic kitchen waste in our compostable bin. It has to go into putrescibles and thence landfill. That’s a practical demonstration of Manager A saving budget but offloading the spend on Manager B.

It really isn’t.

If the council or company running the place can realistically turn a profit on selling the recyclable stuff (garden waste for composting and bio fuel, bricks and stone for hardcore for house/road building) why wouldn’t they accept commercial waste?

That if is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. Composting is a cost, it’s cheaper than residual disposal but it’s still a cost. Inerts, unless it has been processed, is going to cost to remove too. And to allow that you potentially need to change permit and planning conditions.

The arse has fallen out of the recyclate market with the closure of a lot of the traditional routes for collected recyclate. And the stuff that has value (Metals and Textiles) the trades realise through sales so what they are doing is passing the cost of delivering their businesses back onto the population as a whole.

“My parents still use bottle banks. I have no idea why, they get recycling collected every fortnight along with everyone else.”
Errr . . . maybe they don’t want you to see all the empty wine bottles . . .

Fly tipping is definitely more prevalent right now, to the point where the tippers just do it without really checking who’s looking. The local lanes and field entrances are full of crap so they’re having to go further to dump stuff ironically!

Our tip run by a contractor charges for inert waste like rubble and plasterboard, but the neighbouring council run their own tip, which is actually closer to my house so I go there.

That was the situation at my parent’s house, 6 miles to the one over the county border or 15 miles to their ‘local’ one. That has stopped now though as you have to show proof of residency at them to enter now, the one in their county actually checks the car is registered in the county too. Caused a massive headache when I was sorting out their storage after they moved back in following last year’s floods. I had to take the stuff from their house to my local tip 40 miles away as they would not let me in the tip in my car (using a trailer I’d booked in with them) even though my mum was in the car with me. No mention of the car having to be registered in the county on the website I booked on, a few others were caught out too that day. All of the recycling bins did disappear from car parks a while ago but have been reinstated after local pressure, except the bins are half the size they were and are always full. The kerbside collections also have tight restrictions on the volume now too, the binmen actively apologise about it it’s so tight.

My council require you to book a time slot and limit how many you can use in a year:

You will need to book a time slot each time you visit. ​
​ ​
1 visit per day
26 visits per year for cars
10 visits per year for vans
If you are visiting in a car, you can use your allowance flexibly but cannot visit more than once per day.
If you are visiting in a van or a car with a trailer, you can only book 1 visit per month.

Thankfully my block of flats had giant communal bins (no recycling, everything goes to the local incinerator) so I can get rid of my rubbish easily but the houses nearby regularly dump their rubbish in them as they have tight restrictions too.

The whole system is a mess.

A lot of the ones near me at supermarkets got pulled at the start of the lockdowns but so far none have returned. The ones that remain are always rammed full which proves teh demand…

TBH we’re middle class as **** so there’s not really been an increase in mess but I guarantee there’s a lot of stuff going to landfill and a lot of hard taught behaviour being unlearned.

@mrhoppy:

Quite simply you aren’t living as low consumption life as you think or you are not using all of the options available to you. And if you do you should be considering your behaviours. You’ll forgive me if that sounds blunt but I worked for many years responding to just those issues with residents and helping them. Unless you and your wife are both suffering from adult incontinence in which case there will be support measures in place.

It’s not massively surprising that there are booking systems at the CA sites, it’s a Covid control measure that has been put in place to allow the sites to operate.

Yes there are limits on what they accept and some things that are charged for but local government is getting to the point that it is having to make a decision on which statutory services can be maintained and which can be cut back to the bare essentials.

Aside from the fact that I would certainly argue that I am living a low-consumption life compared to most (and my degree in environmental management would arguably give me a better-than-most ability to make that assessment) – it doesn’t matter.

If we want to stop fly tipping then it doesn’t matter why people (or companies) want/need to get rid of waste. We need to make it as easy as possible.

Money’s a made up construct anyway. Spend on ensuring ALL waste is centrally gathered and recycled. Trying to do it other ways is clearly not working.

I don’t know why they don’t allow fly-tippers access to a single field where anyone can dump anything free of charge. Then, every year on bonfire night, set fire to it. Hey presto! Problem solved. No rubbish in the lanes, no hassle of recycling etc… Everyone loves a good burn-up, young and old alike.

But none of this is exceptional, the Council’s will have considered this within the design and planning.

Our council stopped collecting plastic in pink ‘bin bags’ a few years ago, and gave all households a big pink mesh bag insteasd. It’s just about big enough for my family of five most of the year – not Xmas, Easter etc. However what the council didn’t think through is the lack of a properly closable lid in a coastal city that has regular high winds . This means that plastic flies around the streets for hours on end until the bin lorry arrives and ignores the loose rubbish, just taking whatever is left in the mesh bag.

And there obviously must be storage space in the houses because the stuff was stored before hand waste doesn’t come from nowhere.

Genuinely laughable. Is this an example of council thinking?

white101, thats why fines need to massively increase. At the time the EPA came out in 1992 the in phrase was the polluter pays.

Ironically the UK and EU both got their approach to recycling wrong at the same time. Tax people producing the rubbish who in reality have little control over it rather than tax virgin raw materials punitively which would have driven industry to embrace recycled materials much more quickly and created a market for the collected materials.

Policy failure all round leading to fly tipping and large amounts still being burnt / landfilled.

I don’t get it – we don’t get any glass collections so we rely completely on bottle banks for recycling. WTF are we supposed to do if bottle banks are removed? It is, quite frankly, an imbecilic idea. This kind of nonsense WILL lead to more fly tipping, and that is exactly what is happening in my area…

Fly tipping isn’t generally wine bottles and jars, it’s plasterboard and builders rubbish or house clearances. Also where do you think the glass you put in the public recycling bins goes? If it worked out cheaper to recycle than landfill the council would be doing kerbside collections to keep costs down. If all the collections they do are car park bins it’s window dressing only and probably isn’t cost effective or making any difference environmentally.

With regards to those suggesting the carpark bins are pointless in Leamington, this is not the case. I used to take all of my tetrapacks and black plastic to be recycled on my weekly shop as the kerbside collection doesn’t take them. Now they would all have to go to landfill as **** making a booking at the tip to recycle them. I know most people in Leamington are unaware of this and I’m definitely unusual in going to those lengths but it winds me up that something so widely recycled now has no reasonable solution. The council website does say the kerbside recycling scheme is being overhauled in August 2022 but the fact is the council has declared a climate emergency yet is reducing recycling efforts. I know they’re not quite the same thing but still…

However, I’ve just moved to Sheffield which means I’ve swapped an inability to recycle tetrapacks to plastic bottles being the only plastic we’re supposed to put in the recycling bin. Wish they would define the recycling marking rather than catering to the lowest common denominator and just saying “bottles”.

There is actually ‘some’ money in UK recycling. The first bottle banks were introduced from a private glass-making firm in Lancashire, who wanted low cost raw material.
Same is true of aluminium, paper and soft plastics: they have a value.
Composite items like plasterboard and fluroescent tubes are harder to recycle
Whether the entire process can be left to the private sector, I don’t know, but certainly the materials like glass, paper and metal will be more valuable than wood or water.

I think the other key point many are missing is collecting doesn’t equal recycling and recycling doesn’t equal reuse. If there is no market for the recycled materials they just get stock piled. The sad truth is we generate far more recyclable material than can be reused. Much of what was collected in the boom years was simply sent abroad to the far east where some got recycled, lots got burnt and lots just got dumped. This was done on the pretence of recycling and was cheaper than dealing with it properly in the UK where at least there are standards in place for these unenvironmently friendly practices.

So sorry if you can’t recycle your tetrapaks but it’s not very sensible to do it just to make you feel better if all that happens is if gets stockpiled with no chance of being reused. We need a fundamentally different approach, recycling needs to be a consequence of generating demand, not stockpiling rubbish to make ourselves feel better.

There is actually ‘some’ money in UK recycling. The first bottle banks were introduced from a private glass-making firm in Lancashire, who wanted low cost raw material.

But they aren’t in it now though. Current glass prices are between £15/tonne (clear glass high) and -£2/tonne (green glass low for colour separated glass (letsrecycle.com Feb 2021 colour separated prices). Those bring banks hold 2-3 tonnes of which 50% typically is green as that’s what the UK generates most of, based on average prices (~£7/tonne) you might make £14-20 from each one you collect. Typically takes around an hour per lift on average (depot to depot) using a vehicle driven by an HGV qualified driver. You’re pretty much making a loss before you consider fuel, vehicle depreciation, container maintenance/repair, cost to transport to reprocessor and general overheads. Good quality mixed paper is maybe £30/tonne, soft plastics you can’t get away, PET/HDPE has value, metals are worthwhile. Yes it’s cheaper than disposal costs but don’t go kidding yourselves that there is much in the way of money here.

On the issue of food waste – whether it is accepted for “composting” depends on who has the contract for disposal. Most commonly these days it seems to be feedstock for anaerobic digesters and what you can put in depends on the site licence regardless of if it would work. So whilst one site might accept food scraps another won’t and another again might take food contaminated cardboard from takeaways. There needs to be a lot of streamlining to these systems if we are ever going to fully realise their potential.

Another missed opportunity is animal waste, huge potential there as it can be digested and then either used as fertiliser or burnt in an energy from waste plant. Still better than landfill.

Our previously allowed food/kitchen waste was all organic material plus egg shells. No meat derived products allowed

No consistency at all is there?

We have 4 240l bins emptied on a 3 week rotation (the garden waste gets done fortnightly), we can manage to skip an empty, sometimes two but then there are others who don’t understand that you can fold boxes and crush bottles to make room and struggle with 3 weeks. No idea what they are doing tbh, we’re a family of 3 fwiw. I could see the point if it was the daft wee boxes but we now have 3x the capacity with effectively the same collection frequency.

As for the supermarket skips, just abused by “man with a van” and folk that cant be bothered seperating. Would be nice if the tip was in town or at least not 2 miles up a ten percenter followed by a blind national road.

I cordially invite you to **** off as well.

Maybe if more workers had a union with teeth employers wouldn’t get away with the practices that breed resentment and discontent. Unions have next to no power these days but still remain a handy scapegoat for shitty employmemt practices. Race to the bottom you say?

There’s unions and there’s unions and there’s good and bad union reps too.
Having been involved in change initiatives where you are trying to improve processes to help tax payers money be better spent and come across significant objection because of ‘reasons’ and no we weren’t looking at reducing head count, just trying to change the way some things were done, move away from job rates and get people working together as a team more.
Good union reps are great for their members, bad union reps are crap for their members and often the customers their members work for.

@oldtennisshoes sorry, bad day. Got my jag the day before, felt like crap and was taking umbrage at everything.

Don’t disagree with what you say there, your first post just came across a bit anti-union was all.

Thank god we live where we do. Council tried a few method for kerbside recycling and went from the teeny box/mesh sack method to finally the big grey wheelie bin. All recyclable waste goes in the one bin and gets collected fortnightly. I think they worked out it was cheaper to collect in bulk and separate centrally rather than spend the time doing it at the kerb and relying on the public separating correctly.

Charity recycling bins round here have not been getting collected due to COVID and have clear signs not to leave any bags, but hasn’t stopped anyone. One at local leisure centre surrounded by bags of old clothes which will now probably just have to be dumped after sitting in the rain and snow all winter.

None of this stuff works unless you make it as easy as possible for people to do.
Only way to stop fly tipping is to make disposal free and have centres open longer.

and no we weren’t looking at reducing head count

<cynical head on>

Not on that occasion possibly. Many union people know their managers and you’re on a poor wicket if they haven’t been treated properly in the past by that cadre. Any changes asked for are usually to reduce cost, reducing cost will normally have an effect on quality of life, jobs or wages. Like HR departments, managers aren’t there for workers benefit, union reps sole purpose is to ensure their members get the best deal possible. (To use the business psychopath’s excuse of choice, ‘it’s just business’).

</cynical head>

@squirrelking no worries

@sandwich reduce costs possibly, improve quality probably, improve VFM for the tax payer definitely.

As for the supermarket skips, just abused by “man with a van”

Abusers gonna abuse…

My point is, isn’t it better to have the abuse in a tarmac location or two in an urban environment, rather than down an embankment into a stream down a singletrack lane.
Removing these facilities will undoubtedly lead to more of the latter. Really upsetting to see.

VFM for the tax payer doesn’t make it onto the radar for the workforce. They are there to put a pot of jam on the table, the inter-connectedness does not even register.

I feel your pain. I struggle to find glass recycling bottle banks where I am. My local Kirklees council made the decision about 6 years ago, to no longer give out blue crates for glass bottles, further removing the incentive and ease of ability to recycle. I don’t know what on earth they were thinking of, and they have the brass nerve to talk about how they want to improve recycling rates whilst making it difficult for the public to do so.

I’ve heard other councils have similar issues. If they want to tackle the problem they need to stop punishing people for recycling, and stop being so restrictive when it comes to recycling bays at the tip. It’s no wonder flytipping is so common these days.

My point is, isn’t it better to have the abuse in a tarmac location or two in an urban environment, rather than down an embankment into a stream down a singletrack lane.

Unfortunately [and I realise this is really location specific] the supermarket referred to backs onto a burn (more a small river at that point tbh) that flows into the firth about 200m away. The leisure centre bins aren’t much better, a wind heading offshore would have a similar effect. And round here it does get windy.

Personally I’m not really sure what the answer is but if households didn’t get charged *checks NAC site* “For up to 5 items – £25.20, extra items £5.04 each” then I dare say man with a van wouldn’t be making as much cash and dumping shit everywhere. Even if you could get a commercial bin/dumpster left for a reasonable charge that would be an improvement.

There they remove glass recycling bottle banks, online they let retailers pay for used packaging material (referring to the German Packaging Act, which applies also to marketplace retailers!). I’ll never understand all these measurements…