Warning on Shropshire’s green waste collections
Tuesday 2nd November 2010, 10:38AM GMT.
SHIREHALL CHIEFS today denied kerbside green waste collections could be axed by Shropshire Council after a leading member warned their future was “up for debate”.
The warning was sounded last night by Councillor Gwilym Butler, cabinet portfolio holder for partnership working.
The council is currently working on plans to save £66 million in the next three to four years.
Councillor Butler made his comments at a meeting of Cleobury Mortimer Parish Council during a discussion over the removal of community skips in Shropshire market towns.
“Whether we will be picking up green bins in the future is up for debate,” he said.
“Can we afford to pick up garden waste in the new world when a lot of it can be composted? These are the challenges we are facing.”
But Andy Goldsmith, Shropshire Council’s assistant director of public protection, said: “There are no plans at the moment to change the waste collection service but we are looking at all expenditure to see where efficiencies and savings can be made.”
All Shropshire householders are offered a kerbside collection of garden waste and cardboard which is taken for composting.
It is converted into compost at local farms and spread on agricultural land.
In the north and south of the county, organic kitchen waste can be added to bins and there are special facilities converting this to high quality compost sold to the public via garden centres.
Last night Cleobury parish councillor Betty Davies said the removal of skips had been a “big loss to the town” and suggested bringing back some form of community landfill and recycling drop-off points.
She also said residents in flats or small homes were struggling to accommodate up to five waste and recycling bins and boxes.
But Councillor Butler said: “Shropshire Council has been named as one of the top authorities for recycling.
“We are looking at the possibility of putting a recycling centre in the town but we have now gone five or six months without the skips and there has been no fly-tipping.”
By Dave Morris
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It’s not going to happen, the government have EU targets to meet so I can’t see this happening ever, if anything there will be more collections.
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After the cost of implementing this idea it better not be axed, if it is then axe the idiots who put the idea forward.
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‘cabinet portfolio holder for partnership working.’ Can someone explain to me what this is? Sounds very impressive…..
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Partnership working = using private contractors. :)
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Sure, I’ll explain.
“(Non-)jobs for the boys with expenses and decent attendance allowances tacked on”.
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If the green bins go we should return to weekly black bin collection – The green bins were the justification for the 3rd world conditions we now face having to store rubbish for 14 days outside our homes.
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3rd world conditions? Perhaps you should go on holiday to Africa and see how people really live in 3rd world conditions. Then perhaps you will come up with something more sensible to say.
If it really bothers you having to store rubbish for 14 days then why don’t go and take some to the tip when you next go into town?
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this will never happen, its just political “kite flying” to justify cuts to other frontline services and hikes in parking charges
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I think the key words are “comment” and “debate” – noone’s said it’s going to happen but every service the council provides is under review at the moment as simple as that. There are people higher up the political chain pushing for weekly collections to return accross the country as a whole, if this were to be implemented then obviously something else would have to be cut to balance the costs out. All ideas and hot air at the moment tho as far as I can see and the media just like to jump on it….
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GOOD COMMENT!! I Wish people would not be so reactionary
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this is a joke – right?
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Am I cycnical or would the removal of these services reduce the volume of recycling and make the incincerator a more justifiable proposition for the council. I wonder…..
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OMG!!!!!
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after the fiasco over skips and then food waste people in south shropshire must be praying to bring back the district council who knew how to run services well.
Shropshire Council has been a disaster for us, in particular with the waste collections, its only been a year or two but already they are cutting these front line services. Whilst there is so much inefficiency to address at the council its unacceptable – bring back south shropshire district council and repatriate waste services to the control of local people
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yes i agree with you there mate the decision to stop food waste collection in ludlow was shortsighted to say the least as i just said below it will be regretted now
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They must be incapable of adding up. I dont beleive it, this wont save money, in fact it would cost them money! According to the governments expert waste agency WRAP, to manage one tonne of waste it costs on average:
- £24 for open air composting
- £45 for in vessel
- $57 for anaerobic digestion
- £70 for landfill
- £92 for planned incineration facilities
So really they should be stopping incineration and stopping landfill, composting is cheaper and its better for the environment. Why would you want to cut that?
See link for the full report
http://www.wrap.org.uk/recycling_industry/publications/gate_fees_2010.html
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£92 per tonne for incineration, Green Guru? Veolia will charge Shropshire Council £120 per tonne if we get the Battlefield incinerator, and don’t forget the company also charges £12 per tonne for collecting it from us and delivering it to wherever, plus there is an increase for inflation each year allowed for in the contract.
That’s our money the council wants to spend!
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thats what it costs nikko, thats the facts if Shropshire council are paying more than is the national average as published in the government backed report from WRAP then there must be some serious questions to ask, I cant believe they would pay £120 per tonne because at that price it would be cheaper just to landfill it. Perhaps the additional costs you metion are because of the PFI process which means they are also paying interest on the loan to construct the plant??
Either way I hope people will read the report and realise that composting is the most sustainable and cost effective option available for dealing with the waste produced in the county
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interesting report guru, what you fail to mention of course is that back yard composting = £0 not a penny, completely no cost to the taxpayer at all
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Thanks for this useful information, green guru.
It would be great now if the people responsible for this decision ( http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2010/07/30/weekly-food-waste-collections-axed-in-three-shropshire-towns/ ) could explain the economic arguments for their decision to the Shropshire public.
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We have 8 or 9 different tubs bags and bins now. I think it’s getting a bit silly. Now we have the ‘food waste’ bin which the only purpose I can see is attracting flies to the house.
Tempted to bin the bins and dump everything at the tip. Could I get a council tax discount if I stopped the collection and went private?
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this is never going to happen because there are too many voters using this service probably 90% of people in the summer atleast so politically it would be suicide to cut it when there are much easier softer options like cutting back on staff pay for starters and if you want to cut services well i once saw figures around 17% for the amount of voters use libraries and so cut that the other thing is with garden waste collection they could be much much more sensible with it and only collect it in the summer like they used to, the problem of course though now you have to put your food in the green bin it has to be a year round service so they shot themselves in the foot with the foolish decision to axe the ludlow food waste service there now they cannot make any savings on winter garden waste collections, stupid, stupid, stupid
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Whats all this jibba jabba all about?
At the risk of insulting myself, surely there are better things to comment on about than something that MAY or MAY NOT happen. According to Mayan beleifs, the world may – or may not – end in 2012. No one is really panicking about that.
Honestly, this is not an announcement. Please put things into perspective.
If you are really that protective of your Council services, have you let the Council know? Have you sent a letter? Fired off an email? Phoned them? Taken the time to speak to your Councillor? Started a petition? No. Didn’t think so – that would be too much like democracy, wouldn’t it? Seems you’re all too busy with ‘over the back fence gossip and scaremongering’ than to step up to the plate and take some responsibility for your own lives.
We are told we now live in the ‘Big Society’, clearly this Big Society only works if someone does it for you.
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this is just classic politics, he is buttering us up for cuts, just like the national picture the tories want to scare you into being releived when the cuts dont appear as big as feared, well when shropshire council lays off its street sweepers, closes the libraries and stop repairing roads for a year, we will all breath a sigh of releif because at least our precious green bins get collected
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i cant imagine this would be too popular, surely a better idea would be simply to charge a modest annual subsciption based on use, it would be fairer too because those with the biggest gardens would pay more where as those in flats and town centres who would generally be poorer need not pay at all
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you assume all rural people are rich, my nana lives on a war widows pension and has about 6 acres but she cant afford to heat the place, get a life red ken, get real
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No offence, but with 6 acres she’s surely got enough room to home compost and so doesn’t actually need this service…?
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Thats some sweeping statement, Kenny.
If those running the bin services could pull their finger out of their nostrils for a moment and accelerate the introduction of new recycling collections – to include ALL plastics, tetrapacks, food waste, whatever, perhaps Shropshire Council would have a fair argument for introducing pay-as-you-throw policy on general rubbish.
At home, if tetrapacks, food plastics and food waste collections were started, we’d have barely anything in the black bin at all.
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Tetrapaks are collected at these points, silence: http://www.shropshire.gov.uk/waste.nsf/open/691007238C4A004D802574EC002CBA85
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there isnt one in ellesmere though
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i think most really rich people just pay their gardeners to take it away dont they ? so they would be no worse off anyway, thats the problem with socialist engineering mate it just doesnt work
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what a stupid comment red ken, you cant stereotype and generalise everyone like that even people in flats have gardens and lawns you know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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the point is that if people would just home compost more, this service would be redundant, so it neednt be a CUT it could actually be made unneccesary but it needs some up front investment in supporting people to compost at home and then no one would miss the service anyway
the problem is because its been around for a while people take it for granted but if you can rememebr only about 5 years ago we all managed without it, we just composted or put it in the bonfire on bonfire night, its really no chore
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I would bet a riot would break out where I live people love their garden waste service, in the summer it saves about 5 trips to the tip, so what about the queues of traffic at the tip and all the carbon footprint?
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i dont care my black bin is half empty now they recycle plastics so i’ll just put it in there – that or i’ll dump it at shire hall!!
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More CON-DEM cuts to frontline services
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Christine, next time, try to make a sensible point. Or you might stand ‘condemned’ as having nothing useful to add.
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this would be the most controversial cut since they tried to cut the rural primary schools. i’d be very suprised if it was politically acceptable
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Recycling has its costs here in Market Drayton
1) I have to wash out glass jars using washing up liquid and hot water or they will not be collected? Pasta Jars have been refused with pasta sauce around ther lids ? WHY?
2) To visit the recycling centre its a 26 Mile round journey to and from Whitchurch.
I am sure that with hot water costs and 6 visits to Whitchurch per year this cannot add up to helping the environment?
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Paul, I am sure that you are right to say that the water you are using to rinse your jars adds up gradually and is therefore wasteful, and it is an interesting point that you have made.
However, armed with this knowledge, we could all be less wasteful, couldn’t we?
We could perhaps use cold water and a washing-up brush on those jar lids, for example, couldn’t we?
All things considered, recycling saves water.
Extracting virgin raw materials for single-use packaging requires water.
Manufacturing new jars and paper requires water
Recycling therefore ultimately reduces water use.
Would you not agree?
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Use the left over washing up water after you have done the dishes or put them in the dishwasher with your plates
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save yourself a journey – stop producing so much rubbish in the first place!
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no way!!! dont they have a legal duty to provide??? i cant see how it saves them money if their recycling performance is used as a target to secure government grants and avoid landfill fines surely it would cost them more money to not provide???
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I reckon the bin men would have something to say about this, should we be bracing ourself for a winter of discontent, rubbish piled up in the street with no collections….
Oh no, wait, that was last Xmas!
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why not just offer these services to businesses like the old district council collections did?? There is a lot of money to be made out there from businesses who are keen to go green and reduce their waste disposal costs, as they have trucks passing by every day it seems rediculous that they dont do them all on the same collection round, also this way the business gets a cheaper collection and the council gets an income stream, so its a win, win.
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this is a stupid idea, it would never work on a practical level because the council has got rubbish and recycling services that are intergrated onto one another, the whole point of alternating weekly collections is to have a collection of green bins on the opposite week to the black bin. You cant have one without the other – the whole collection service is mutually dependant on each aspect of it – if you pull one service out the whole system would collapse like a house of cards
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if they implemented this I for one would make sure they get voted out at the next election
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i could cope with this so long as they bring the skip back in bishops castle
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To many “cheifs” and not enough Indians at
shirehall.Or should that be to many cheifs and
not enough binmen.
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Note to council: Don’t think aloud. The general public will assume your thoughts are hard and fast policy.
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fair enough then i’ll just dump it at shire hall – we pay enough tax to comfortably cover the running of services the problem is excessive management overheads
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Evidence? Or just what someone said in the Pub and you want to sound informed.
P.S. Before you answer, you might want to google the words ‘UK Deficet’
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sorry but this is a “rubbish” idea, you cant encourage people to recycle whilst providing free rubbish collections unless you at very least make the recycling free if anything they should be paying us to recycle because otherwise its just going to go into the rubbish bin the only way this would work is if you introduced it alongside pay as you throw rubbish collections but that is not legal in this country so its a non starter of a so called idea anyway
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we dont even get it where we live, its communal grounds and the gardener takes it all away – so my council tax is subsidising people who use this service
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Would you prefer it if these people burnt their green waste or sent it to landfill, freddie?
Surely the best thing would be to demand green waste collections in your area.
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so you don’t even get a cardboard collection option? If you pushed for the landlord to have garden bins collected surely it’d bring down your annual rent slightly as the work the gardener does getting rid of the garden waste would decrease….
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after the debacle of last winter, i didnt get a garden waste collection for almost two months! forget it, ill burn it and have my money back please, this should be a rebate off my council tax of at least £30 please
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surely a better option would be to retain the collections but to charge a small fee or generate some income by selling the compost back to us?
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it always annoys me that you cant buy the compost back off the council, after all its our compost, from our stuff, we should be given it really but i’d even be willing to buy it, so why the council are so lacking in entrepreneurial spirit is beyond me, its got to be a better way to make the whole service pay for itself better
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its not like people composting their garden waste has caused the nation bankrupty is it now? come on this is so unfair, why not tax the banks and use the money to support local councils frontline services like this? the condems are soft on bankers
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Unitary Authority. Such a good idea. Or perhaps not.
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this spineless leak to the press is what no doubt passes for “consultation” these days right?
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As the quote says its not definately being cut its just being considered, i wish people would read, personally i could cope without it not a problem i just wish they would pick up the rubbish weekly because thats more hygeinic, you have to cut something so its this or schools or litter bins or swimming pools or something, so something must be done
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i think everything is under threat of cuts now with the condems in, nothing is sacrosant there must be no holy cows if you can get people to compost at home instead then perhaps thats the answer, cheaper and its the big society where people dont need the government but are self sufficient instead
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how can u justify collecting garden waste all year round 18 ton lorry running round with 3 members of staff collecting fresh air either scrap it or just provide the service when it is needed [march/october]
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