Campaigner forces cardboard recycling axe debate
Saturday 26th November 2011, 7:00PM GMT.
A Shirehall debate has been forced on a controversial decision to end kerbside cardboard collections in the county thanks to an e-petition set up by a Shropshire campaigner.
Patrick Cosgrove’s petition on Shropshire Council’s website passed the 1,000-signature mark yesterday afternoon.
Under council rules, when 1,000 signatures are collected in a petition a debate on the issue is triggered.
So far a total of 1,021 names have been added to the petition.
From the start of next week, more than 130,000 homes in the county will be banned from putting cardboard in garden waste bins following a decision by waste firm Veolia Environmental Services, which is responsible for disposing of rubbish for Shropshire Council.
Householders wanting to recycle cardboard will now have to take it to one of the county’s five recycling centres or recycling banks.
The online petition, set up this month, calls for kerbside collections of cardboard to be reinstated.
“Many local authorities, including Telford, continue to collect cardboard and dispose of it in a sustainable fashion,” it says.
“Some local authorities in the UK are actually beginning to collect waste cardboard. Shropshire Council must work harder and faster to find a way of disposing of waste cardboad without sending it to landfill.”
Shropshire councillor Jon Tandy said: “I think it shows the strength of feeling and I’m having e-mails all the time. The general public are trying to get something started up.
“Officers and councillors have got to look at it again and come up with a solution that will please the general public. It is not the general public’s fault.
“People have got used to recycling everything – now we are being told it doesn’t make a difference.”
A spokesman for Veolia said: “We are currently working with Shropshire Council to assess different ways of collecting card at the kerbside.”
A Shropshire Council spokesman said no date had yet been set for the debate.
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Good for you Patrick! All the pushing and educating and making us believe it’s our moral responsibility to recycle. Most of us do it – piles of stuff faithfully kept for two weeks – all sorted and put into the appropriate receptacles and out at the kerb on the appropriate day.
Yet as soon as things get a little bit difficult for the council – they can’t be bothered – no make people drive to the tip (hardly a green solution) Well guess what most of them won’t bother – it will go straight in the general waste and clog up the land fill! Please find a way to continue the kerb side cardboard recycling
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It will only go in our general waste bin if there’s room for it, if there is no room then the cardboard will be left in the street with the hope that the binmen will take it
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Eat our shorts Veolia!
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“A spokesman for Veolia said: “We are currently working with Shropshire Council to assess different ways of collecting card at the kerbside.”
It doesn’t take a genius to work it out, put any cardboard in one of the recycling boxes (not in the bin which has garden waste).
Surely the Council would have been notified of the new composting regulations some months before the change so preparations to deal with the new regulations should have been in place to deal with the collection of cardboard.
Lack of preparation by the Council,again!
No doubt this has cost a lot of money caused by the apathetic attitude of the Council.
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Is this move by the Contractor intended/ designed to minimise overhead and maximise Profit for them – and to blazes with the Customers, (US) ??
G.S.CLARKE, SHREWSBURY.
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good
lets hope they dont just TALK about it but DO something about it
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the voice of reason from joe public has spoken.
and after the unreasonablness of shropshire council expecting us to all spend an extra £30 a year on fuel to go to the tip every fortnight
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its too little too late, the ban starts at midnight tonight, my green bin full of card will i assume not be collected when due on wednesday and they havent even scheduled a debate on solving it yet. this is rediculous the council moves at snails pace. the new pas100 standard came in in january 2011 and they have spent 11 months fiddling while rome burns – utterly useless and incompetent
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http://petitions.shropshire.gov.uk/consult.ti/system/viewPetition?petitionid=3850&nexturl=%2Fconsult%2Eti%2Fsystem%2FlistPetitions%3Faction%3Dopen%26search%3D%26sort%3D%26dir%3Dasc%26startrow%3D1
Shortcut for anyone who wants to sign, lets hope the council do something to return them or start proceedings for breach of contract by Veolia.
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veiola have been nothing but rubbish for recyclcing in shropshire since they got here the service has been cut back everywhere. i wish they would go back to france with their dirty incinerator and unreliable collections
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DONT DEBATE IT! SORT IT OUT! MY RUBBISH BIN IS ALREADY OVERFLOWING WITH CARDBOARD ADDED IT HAS ATLEAST DOUBLED THE AMOUNT WE CHUCK OUT EACH WEEK
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well i do hope councillor oswestrian with their misinformed views will stand up and make a speech about their opinion on things only to be shot down by the facts
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I think this is outrageous and unacceptable. Me and my family make sure that we recycle almost everything that we possibly can.
we always put it all in the right tubs we work hard making sure everything is washed and clean ready to go out on the day provided for us by the council to take them away.
For you to stop the carboard from being taken from the kirb side and for us to take it our selves to the tip is unfair and we don’t all have cars and the nearest tip is miles away and with children this can be exstreamly hard to do, we are ment to be going greener to protect our enviroment, but now you want us to drive it down to the skip!!!! how is that helping us stay green. all people will do is dump it somewhere close or they will burn it and cause polution which will affect the earth or they will hide it in the house hold waste bins for it to sit ontop of the land fill.
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We recycle very little paper, so for us it would make perfect sense to use the paper recycling box for cardboard.
Our nearest recycling centre is a 36 mile round trip, so hardly a reasonable request.
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well i hope they extend the debate to the whole rotten 27 year!! PFI contract and the merits of spending millions on the company credit card to buy facilities which are already redundant due to high levels of recycling makeing them unneeded
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well done patrick cosgrove
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Yes, thank you for doing this, Patrick Cosgrove.
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this doesnt add up to me. they say this is all caused by PAS100 but this came in A YEAR ago so why the sudden panic now??
I am most hacked off with the lack of communication too – to give us a few weeks notice and do it at christmas of all times when we arent using our green bins for anything but cardboard just seems designed to cause maximum aggrevation and inconvenience to us the paying customers
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Veolia knows all too well that the great majority of households WILL NOT at their OWN expense, take their waste cardboard to a recycling centre. Everyone will simply flat pack it and throw it in the none recycling waste wheelie bin (as I have already started to do). Veolia can then turn round and say, ‘Look at this increase in the amount of waste to Landfill, we really do need that incinerator now’!
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More public sector “mistakes” and still they want to protect their pensions…they don’t deserve a wage let alone a pension for allowing Veolia to mess us about like this.
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they have definately been to easy on veolia, they pay for a service and so they should be obliged to fix it like in the real world if you pay for something you have protection under the law from such inproper levels of service
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well dun patrick
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this is clearly a mess. veolia should be sacked for incompetence
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if they cant figure it out by now they must be thick. its not rocket science
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Sign up to the petition sheep nothing will happen. Who do you think made the decision to stop taking cardboard in the first place.
You people don’t have clue how to take effective action just how to whinge and and spell badly. Grow up, get your act together, get your facts straight and remember who produces the rubbish in the first place-you.
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it was veolias decision i beleive?
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Good call Frederica. Residents seem to feel they have very little thought for the waste they produce and think that because they pay (a very small proportion of the council tax) that all the responsibility is then not theirs. Tell you what, I might start a petition to remove paying for waste services from the council tax and have no waste collection service. Like them apples?
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It’s a pity that supermarkets don’t have a collection facility for cardboard recycling – as I am sure they have plenty to recycle themselves, and probably already have some sort of arrangement for that. My workplace has a collection crate for cardboard, collected weekly for recycling by a local company – for free! Also – why is cardboard not allowed onto the newspaper/paper box? Is it so very different?
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I agree, the supermarkets all recycle their cardboard out the back of the store so why not let us add ours in there too?
I’m taking mine into work too for now but its a pain when i pay over £1000 to the council each year i think they should do it for me.
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these people live in cloud cuckoo land if they think cardboard is not the single biggest amount of waste we produce
i cant think of a word to describe just how thoughtless and stupid this decision is
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And what figures do you have that may give us a more accurate picture? I do agree that it is a real shame that cardboard is not currently collected, but hopefully this will change
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These people are simply incompetent and should be removed from their jobs. Oh I dont blame the bin men, its the over paid under worked management in shire hall that is the problem. they should have sorted this out months ago and provided a seamless transition from composting cardboard to recycling it instead. To ask people to bin it in a time of rising landfill costs is simply criminal waste of public money and of a precious natural resource in the paper fibres which could be reused to make more paper and cardboard
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madness
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im not bothered about the composting issues i just want a pick up. its not too much to ask if they have a problem composting its their problem not mine. i am the paying customer after all and i want a pick up, if they cant compost it, recycle it instead
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i am though because our neighbours in borough of wrexham can still put card in there compost bins so why can’t we?
shropshire council claim it cannot be done anymore anywhere but i spoke to wrexham council the other day and they are still doing it now and for ever more they say it actually helps with their composting process!
so shropshire council are lying to people its an outrage
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Agreed. Dont give us excuses. Give us a recycling collection and do it quickly.
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they can get rid of my green bin then its pointless without card
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veolia has let the whole county down and should pay the ultimate price for this by losing their contract. they milk millions from the taxpayer each year and make billions in profit out of it.
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shropshire council, what a load of rubbish.
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this debate is needed to shine the public spotlight and press scrutiny all over this decision which was taken by a profit making private company against the interests of the public without any democratic accountability
#expose their lies
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It wont change a thing. Democracy in this country means nothing anymore you have the same old red and blue areas every year the same safe seats, it just means nothing anymore so people dont bother voting which just reinforces the safeness of the seats still further. Its a vicious circle
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