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Friday 20 January 2012

Brent Council Recycling More

Brent Council is recycling more with its new system.  The overall rate for the October/December quarter was 42%, compared to 30% for the same quarter last year.  Total waste is also down slightly.

This confirmation that the Labour administration were right to override opposition from the Tories and Liberals in adopting the new system.  Notably Sarah Teather chose to come out against the new arrangements (rather late in the day).  In doing so, she has established herself as an anti-environmentalist and spendthrift.  The 12% increase in the quarter compares to an increase of 6% in recycling rates over the four years of Brent's previous Liberal Democrat / Tory administration.

As the arrangements become more refined, I expect recycling levels to go up even more.

2 comments:

Shahrar Ali said...

Dear Cllr Powney,

Critics of the scheme warned of well-documented cases where comingling resulted in contamination of the recyclable materials after attempted separation into usable bales (e.g. of plastics or of paper).

Do you yet have figures about the amount of separated material that, because of contamination, ends up in landfill further downstream? Or do you even have any way of auditing this? This is not the same as the amount of material that Brent sends direct to landfill, for sure, but clearly an important criterion for assessing the success of the scheme and answering your critics.

Barking and Havering Council recently switched to the separation at source method that Brent used to have, which results in a higher quality recyclable product.

SA

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry but this is RUBBISH - check any of the Blue Bins - they are full of carrier bags and black bin bags full of contaminated rubbish-very few people are using that system correctly and you haven't given any follow up on educating them.

Of course recycling is up because you can now recycle MORE things.
Stop patting yourself on the back as usual and sort this out.

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