Question
When is Wokingham Council going to start kerbside recycling of glass, and so reach their 50% recycling target by 2020?
Minutes:
When is Wokingham Council going to start kerbside recycling of glass, and so reach their 50% recycling target by 2020?
Answer
In your recent newsletter you claim to have forced the Conservatives on Wokingham Borough Council to retain weekly waste collections. It has been the policy of the Conservative Group on this Council for many years to retain weekly waste collections. We issued a press release to that effect nearly a year ago. It appears you missed that.
In my leaflets in the 2007 election at which I was first elected to this Council I said we must retain weekly waste collections and encourage more recycling. David Chopping and Tim Holton made similar statements.
So that is another Liberal myth busted.
So what happens where Liberals are in control of a Council? Of those we checked, the vast majority have collections every two weeks rather than the weekly collections we have here in Conservative Wokingham.
So how often do they have collections in Cheltenham? Bi-weekly.
How often in Colchester? Bi-weekly.
How often in Eastleigh? Bi-weekly.
How often in Maidstone? Bi-weekly.
You get the picture.
The existing glass banks are well used so we capture most glass waste. By using bring banks we get the glass sorted into colours which improves the value for recycling. If it was collected kerbside then either it would be mixed or we would need collection vehicles with lots of compartments. Such vehicles would be expensive to buy and operate.
It offers our taxpayers better value to encourage greater use of the bring banks and to increase the number of bring banks. I would welcome your help in identifying more sites for bring banks and encouraging greater use of the bring banks.
Supplementary Question
Veolia are buying about 20 new vehicles to cope with the new collections. And, well done. We are getting food waste collected and more plastics are being recycled. Why didn’t you take this wonderful opportunity when new vehicles were being purchased to also include glass being collected from the kerbside, thereby being more able to hit the recycling targets?
Supplementary Answer
I thought that I had answered that. It would be very expensive to do that. It would require a separate compartment for glass. Either you put all the glass in one compartment, in which case you wouldn’t be able to recycle it and would probably use it for road ballast or you have lots of compartments on the vehicle. So we would need more vehicles or very large vehicles. We would also probably need to provide people with bins to put their bottles in before they were put out. All of that would cost a lot of money.
We have estimated that just collecting from the kerbside and throwing all the bottles in a vehicle would cost about £600k per annum. So, with the Capital costs and the running costs it doesn’t seem like best value for money. We do capture most glass in the bring banks. If we can capture another 10/20% of what people put out in their blue bags then we can notch up the recycling.