Cool idea could see blight of fly-tipped fridges swept away
a time when the waste collection service, even before last year’s crippling strike, was struggling to meet its budget.
In comparison, the council spends a few hundred thousand on picking up fly-tipping.
Elsewhere, in his grand 25-year plan for the UK environment, cabinet minister Michael Gove earlier this year talked about considering the end-to-end process in manufacturing – making industry think about how things will be disposed of or recycled once they have been used to reduce pollution and waste.
It was at the time the Environment Secretary announced he had been ‘haunted’ by the scenes of sea creatures getting tangled in plastic pollution in the BBC’s wonderful Planet Earth II series.
So Birmingham’s new cabinet member for bins Majid Mahmood has written to the cabinet minister on behalf of the city’s waste service asking him to consider forcing fridge makers to recycle their products for free.
Of course the cost may be passed on to consumers, but that would be about £10 on items which cost many hundreds.
More importantly, it would cut a lucrative income stream from the rogues who currently collect the fridge freezers for a small fee, strip the valuable parts out and then dump the rest on the taxpayer-funded and inundated council bins service.
And it would then reduce the blight on our neighbourhoods, with 3,000 of the things a year littering the streets and back alleys.
Seems like a good idea.
ABOUT half a dozen people have contacted us in various forms in the last couple of weeks to complain that the city council was ‘secretly’ plotting to pass a sinister new policy without telling the good people of Birmingham for fear of a huge backlash.
They have urged our media to rise up and investigate this terrible hidden conspiracy and expose it.
The policy they have all been talking about is the so-called ‘clean air zone’ plan to charge diesel drivers in Birmingham city centre.
It was first trailed in 2015 and has been in and out of the news through various court cases, council policy reviews and Government press releases ever since.
The issue was debated heavily in last year’s West Midlands Mayor election campaign and has come up time and time again.
The council’s final plans were expected in February and suppressed until after the May local election – speculation about what it might be became the subject of heated election debate between the Labour and Conservative candidates.
They finally issued their proposal with a press conference and a blast of publicity in June.
The council has embarked on a publicity campaign on social media, printed material and consultation. There are even huge signs along city centre roads asking people to get involved in the consultation.
Our titles have published more than 20 articles on various aspects of the issue, including hearing voices for and against, online and a dozen in print in the last two weeks as well as on social media channels seen by hundreds of thousands of people.
A handful of people who have not seen the coverage blame the council for being secretive.
But it’s like saying there’s a hidden plan to extract Britain from the European Union...