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Researchers to analyse your rubbish
Thursday 25th February 2010, 11:10AM GMT.
An independent research company is being hired to analyse rubbish thrown out by Shropshire householders.
Shropshire Council today denied the researchers would be “bin police” or that residents would face fines if they failed to comply with new rules.
Under the Government’s Zero Waste Places Scheme, the council was given £10,000 to pilot waste reduction and recycling initiatives in the Bishop’s Castle area.
The money is being spent on awareness campaigns, including school visits and household surveys.
A research company will be analysing rubbish samples to gather data on the type and quantity of waste being produced.
Larry Wolfe, the council’s head of waste management, said the authority was awarded the money in partnership with the Bishop’s Castle Wasteless Society
“One of the initiatives being funded using Zero Waste Places funding is a waste composition analysis,” he said.
“This is a valuable way to help us to identify and understand the quantity and type of waste being thrown away in Bishop’s Castle.
“The analysis is being carried out by an independent research company, who are collecting refuse from a sample of properties in the area over different days, and then taking it to a waste depot for analysis.
“The work does not identify which waste comes from which property and it abides by data protection legislation.
“The results will help the council to provide better waste and recycling services, and improve customer satisfaction levels, by understanding what people are throwing away.”
Other initiatives include trying to make the town “plastic bag free” by giving away free re-usable bags to everyone in Bishop’s Castle along with information and advice on how to reduce waste.
The council says that it has no intention of going down the route of fining people who don’t comply with the new waste reduction initiatives.
By Dave Morris
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How much are these researches going to cost and how much will it save?
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like to see you try and shift through my rubbish, looks like the dog has a new toilet and poop a scoop bin….
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more money being spent that could be better used elswhere
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How many more scams ae going to be invented to waste money ? CRAP is CRAP if it’s in the bin it’s rubbish , throw it in the tip ,we don’t need to know what everyone else is dumping !!!!
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It’s a bit short-sighted to call this sort of research a scam.
Where do you think rubbish goes? It is a huge problem how we deal with waste and being in that business has always been lucrative in the past.
Where there’s muck there’s brass!
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if you throw it out then who cares ? its not confidential waste service, if you want it to be confidential you need to shred it. it sounds like a horrible job though, but i dont think it will lead to fraud
I dont know why they are paying more consultants though – i think its pretty obvious if you look in peoples bins it will all be plastic waste and this shows the council is potty driving all over collecting stuff like garden waste which you can compost at home or burn whilst all this plastic which can be recycled gets sent to landfill
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i will be interested to read the results i have long suspected there are people on my street who dont recycle and i suspect you will find there are plenty of recyclable items getting landfilled because people are too lazy to wash them out etc. i resent paying for lazy people i think they shold be charged for waste, i wouldnt pay their phone bill or the gas bill yet i pay their rubbish bill its not fair
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they’re welcome to look in mine, there is nothing hardly left because i recycle every thing i can and i have a compost bin in the garden for all the food scraps
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i would volunteer for this if it helps to convince the council to invest in better recycling schemes its money well spent
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Best of luck to them mooching thru my bin, all that contains is a few leftover food remains that I cannot compost and plastics of which there is a huge amount. Why on earth manufacturers can’t come up with cardboard cartons for washing liquids or fabric softeners beats me.
My biggest problem with waste is the millions of tons of junk papers and leaflets that seem to descend upon us all these days. Even after putting a notice on my door asking them NOT to post this kind of stuff thru I still am labouring under the weight of the stuff! Stick your junk mailings people, you can hardly say you earn from your letter box fillings…and I’m certain the overall refuse collections would be much less.
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seems reasonable to me why all the fuss ?
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big brother spying on us like a communist dictatorship
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if its reduces waste to landfill in the long term it could save millions , the government taxes lanfill now by £40 a tonne, so any efforts to reduce it is saving council tax payers money
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big brother spying on us like a communist dictatorship
Sorry but that’s just stupid. I agree we’re being spied on far too much and I object to it – but this is just finding out what people throw out most of, so it can be best collected and recycled. No point arranging to collect loads of some kinds of waste, and only finding out later that not much of that stuff is being thrown out.
That would be a real waste of money.
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“How much are these researches going to cost?” (jeffb)
Para 3 in the article
“Under the Government’s Zero Waste Places Scheme, the council was given £10,000 to pilot waste reduction and recycling initiatives in the Bishop’s Castle area.”
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i think its a discgrace the council is just an agent of the labour government
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since when has the Star become part of news international, this could have been written by the daily mail, no doubt the immigrants did it
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i think it would be interesting to see the results i think it will show we dont need to burn rubbish in shrewsbury we should try to get more recyclable material out of the rubbish stream either pre-sorting offering better recycling collections or using mechanical and biological treatment which is less polluting and leads to higher recycling
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