Industry calls for new ideas to lift its recycling rate
Wednesday 10th November 2010, 11:30AM GMT.
INDUSTRY is calling for more initiatives to bring commercial waste into line with improvements to household recycling.
In the third quarter, 50% of domestic waste, including garden waste, was recycled, the first time that had happened.
The commercial waste figure last year stood 11% below its 50% target, but Guernsey Building Trades Employers Association president Mark Palfrey (pictured) said it would be unfair to say it was lagging.
‘In the construction industry everyone is doing their best to minimise waste because it’s not financially viable if we don’t,’ he said.
‘We absolutely celebrate what has been achieved so far, but we want to take part in new initiatives.’
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Why not provide initiative to recycle like in europe?
Places put on a small charge of 20p for bottles etc then if you recycle them you get the money back.
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gsy-girl
Interesting idea – a bring bank that spits out 20p coins for each bottle deposited!!
On a serious note, how about all refuse collection lorries being prohibited from collecting recyclables from commercial premises?
This would put an end to shops and businesses leaving cardboard out that would just end up in landfill, and similarly pubs and clubs that leave out bottles and cans.
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Promote & distribute some attractive recycling bins that can be used in the workplace (and household) to sort rubbish – ones that can stack easily and can also be used when the curbside recycling scheme eventually commences.
Perhaps there is someone out there with a truck and resources who would be interested in setting up a private recycling scheme? Im sure a lot of people and businesses who cannot make the trip to recycling themselves would be happy to pay for such a service if it was priced right.
Just to point out, there are a lot of people who dont recycle each week because the current system does not allow them to, for example, anybody who has a mobility problem would find recycling very difficult, frail elderly persons, short people who cant reach the bins, people who dont have cars, people with shoulder problems etc etc etc. All of these people who genuinely want to recycle find it extremely difficult under the current scheme and it is little wonder that they opt out. Perhaps a private/ commercial recycling scheme could also be made available to these people.
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I don’t know if it still happens but a well known SPP cafe bemoaned recently the insanity of the disposal of their glass.
The firm naturally segragates its bottles into Euro bins, it’s easier for them apparently; along comes the bin man wheels it along the road and puts into the compaactor; all of it heading to Mont Cuet.
Crazy huh?
……………
Well done Mr Palfrey; encouraging that the industry is getting/has got the recycling bug/message.
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“Perhaps a private/ commercial recycling scheme could also be made available to these people”
Local outfit http://www.wecycle.gg have identified exactly that gay. £12/month for weekly pick up.
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@gsy-girl –
Places put on a small charge of 20p for bottles etc then if you recycle them you get the money back.
I’m old enough to remember when, in the days before plastic bottles, people could take their empty glass bottles back to any shop that sold that item and receive, I think, a penny or two in return. From recollection, you didn’t need to be buying a replacement and it was quite a lucrative source of pocket money for an enterprising youngster. Perhaps shops could be encouraged along this route and people could take their bottles back each week. It would then be down to the shop to do the recycling but this system would possibly make it easier for the public to recycle a bit more.
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Neil,
People who are unable to recycle for whatever reason could indeed use wecycle, but why should they pay £12 a month when the bin men will take the stuff for nothing?
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ChrisJ – you do realise that you DO pay the bin men to pick up your rubbish?
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Another idea-
It would be excellent if some of the shops introduced internet shopping with home delivery.
Internet shopping with delivery would keep so many cars off the road as the delivery van/truck would deliver to many households in the one trip. Food could be delivered in large crates or the existing hession bags which could be taken back to the store with the next delivery thereby significantly reducing plastic bag usage and so called “bag for life” plastic bags.
Its a very common service in the UK and every other first world nation. I cant see any reason why we cant have it here – we could even make our orders online on a Sunday!!
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If we’re recycling 50% of our domestic waste, why aren’t our rates decreasing by 50%?
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Thanks for the link Neil, been looking for it for ages!
Anyone how successful they are, rich or poor will grow old. Recycling for me is now difficult
Any way to got my golden oldie computers, TV’s etc down for recycling too?
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Toby,
Let’s put it this way then: you have to pay the same for the bin men to take your rubbish away, regardless of whether or not you also pay wecycle £12 a month to recycle it.
The same is true of people who use the bring banks.
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The bin men do not collect rubbish from commercial premises nor are businesses allowed to use the recycling banks for cardboard. They have to pay for their packaging to be collected. The waste contractors then sort what they collect as recyclables cost less than mixed waste tip charges.
Are all the offices and finance houses doing their bit to reduce usage and recycle paper?
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ChrisJ.
You are right. Recycling in Guernsey depends on people doing it because it is the ‘right’ thing to do, not necessarily because it is the easiest or cheapest. Although if your parish is good at recycling, it should reduce the cost your parish charges you to have your bins emptied since the tipping charge at Mont Cuet would be less.
Really, it is illogical that doing the right thing requires more effort (carting everything to the Bring Banks) than doing the wrong thing (bunging everything in the dustbin) which is made easy for us.
If the States are serious when they say that they want a waste strategy based on the Waste Heirarchy, then they would make recycling as easy as possible and that would mean kerbside collections. And then to dissuade us from having a lot of rubbish in our bins, they would introduce pay-as-you-throw schemes across the island for all the ‘residual’ waste.
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Would be interesting to know how the recycling private business is going, I believe they charge £12.00 per month, any news anyone out there?
I was going to sign up but they wanted bankers order, before you got started, know they are a bit more established it might be worth signing up.
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@soph; try Public Services, they still run Environment 2000; but I believe there is now a charge for some items? Failing that Montys Deliveries are a reasonable bunch and will take them to Mayside or the Magpie Yard for a small sum.
Rosie
Under current parish contracts recycling efforts have no effect on the cost to parishioners the trucks still have to visit every home.
Recycling costs money, lots of money. People forget that in the UK they pay a huge Council Tax per year which covers kerbside and other servisce; Guernsey people pay very little in rates.
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In my parish each household pays an average of £8.00 per month to have its refuse collected. This comprises £2.75 for collection, £1.75 for dumping at Mont Cuet and £3.50 towards PSD’s surcharge. It will be interesting to see how those figures compare with the island-wide totals when the WDA analyses the cost to households of our existing waste strategy.
In 2008 we had a kerbside recyclables collection covering half the parish, that year 90 tonnes of recyclables were collected but the weight of ‘black bag’ refuse only dropped from 560 to 520 tonnes.
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Shane Langlois,
Interesting stats from the 2008 kerbside scheme.
There are a few possible interpretations – the straightforward one is that 50 of the 90 tonnes is stuff which would have been taken to bring banks were it not for the kerbside scheme.
Another effect which may be playing a part is the ‘rebound effect’: when people take an action they perceive to be ‘green’, they tend to reward themselves by being ‘ungreen’ in some other way. For example, they might reason that because they are recycling their glass, they are going to buy more stuff in glass than they would otherwise (e.g. glass bottles instead of cans). In effect your parish may have ended up simply generating 50 tonnes more waste than it would have done if you hadn’t had kerbside.
Or the extra 50 tonnes might have come simply from increased standards of living meaning higher consumption – perhaps partly because of people having more time on their hands because they aren’t having to go to bring banks! :-)
Still, a year-on-year drop of 7% going to landfill is nothing to be sniffed at. Looking at what is going to landfill is what we should be doing. Rather than aiming for 50% recycling, which is something we can achieve without doing any good at all just increasing our consumption to generate lots of recyclable waste, we should be aiming for a 50% reduction in household waste to landfill.
Do you know what research was done to try and identify the factors which contributed to the outcomes in the kerbside pilot?
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Once again I can understand why some people don’t care about recycling – no matter what they do their rates never go down. I recycle almost everything but get charged a fortune because of the size of my house and guess what If I didn’t have a lot of space I couldn’t hold onto stuff before I recycle. Crazy isn’t it. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
We pay our rates but get nothing much back. Matt Fallaize the Vale Deputy said he would address the unfairness of this sometime!! Contact him if you live in that parish and ask him what he has done if anything?
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@Shane Langlois, which parish do you live in then?
I’m currently renting and have received a pretty extortionate bill in comparison with yours!
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Dellquay
“Once again I can understand why some people don’t care about recycling – no matter what they do their rates never go down”
In a previous post you were bemoaning the rise in TRP. What do you think would happen with mandatory kerbside recycling? Nothing’s free chum.
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“Once again I can understand why some people don’t care about recycling – no matter what they do their rates never go down.”
I’m no green eco-warrior myself so forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the idea of recycling primarily to reduce consumption of the planet’s resources, not lower our household rates?
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ChrisJ
As far as I am aware research has not been done on the factors contributing to the outcomes of the kerbside pilots. I’d guess there were two or three factors at play, the main one being that much of the recyclable tonnage collected would have been deposited at bring-banks previously. The fact that the black bag tonnage only dropped 14%, extrapolating to the whole parish, indicates that introducing kerbside collections may not be enough in itself, one would have to include food waste and possibly financial incentives. Assume a similar cost of £2.75 per month for sending around a weekly extra lorry for recyclables but that the shipping and processing costs could be met from PSD’s surcharge and you are beginning to approach the cost per household PSD calculated for the Suez incinerator. I’m sure there are answers, its just that they will not be easy ones.
Intrigued
The figure was an average per household in St Peters but of course there would be big variations given the way the refuse rate is calculated. Also the average refuse rate is considerably higher in other parishes. The current charges island wide and their components is something the WDA has to look into for comparative purposes.
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