Fortnightly bin collections increase recycling rate

Last week it was reported that councils that had implemented fortnightly rubbish collections have increased their recycling rate by 7%, not a bad figure really. Even though this change is improving recycling rates there still seems to be a lot of people complaining about the reduced collections, stating that it is unhygienic and that bins are staying full for weeks at a time.

Everyone knows that with the government increasing landfill taxes local councils are trying to find ways of saving money. To them it seems the obvious way of doing this is to only collect peoples rubbish once a fortnight. No one seems to have realised that all that's going to happen is people will just have fuller bins. Reducing the number of times the rubbish is collected isn't going to reduce the rubbish.

Maybe the councils should start concentrating more on educating people about recycling, that way they could keep the weekly bin collections while people learn how to reuse and recycle, thus reducing their waste and the need for weekly collections. Just suddenly changing the way people have done things for years isn't a way of solving a problem, in fact it'll probably make more problems like illegal fly tipping of house hold waste because councils refuse to collect it.

Councils and the government want more people to recycle however they don't seem to be doing anything to actively educate people on how to do it. I've been recycling for some time now and it's still somewhat confusing as to exactly what type of plastic my local council collects. If things like this were laid out better I'm sure I could recycle even more of my waste, but it's not, and until it is people out there are going to carry on just throwing things away rather than recycling it because the average person on the street doesn't want to spend ages working out what kind of plastic something is made from before they decide how they should dispose of it. After all when you're throwing something away you're not really interested in it anymore, are you.

I'm all for getting as many people out there are possible to recycle, but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about things and what the councils are proposing is the wrong way. It wouldn't be so bad if we actually saw some of the money that the councils would be saving but council tax still seems to rise year on year. If people saw that they were getting something back for thinking about what they throw away then maybe they would be more inclined to recycle in the first place. At the end of the day it's not the general public fault that every product you buy now a days is massively over packaged, more often than not with no indication on the packaging as to whether it is recyclable or not. Maybe some of the blame should be being moved to the companies that provide us with the huge amount of waste to get rid of in the first place.

I don't see why fortnightly bin collections couldn't work however the councils are going to have to put more work in to educate people about recycling and reducing their waste.

Source [Guardian Online]