Resumption of waste services shines a light on the whole system
AS with many things in the coronavirus pandemic, community organisations and networks have proven themselves more agile than ‘organised’ levels of governance.
So it’s not surprising that many community councils have now restarted their monthly meetings online, in comparison to Glasgow City Council’s rather slumbering return to democratic control.
Not surprisingly, the resumption of waste and cleansing services has been high on the list of things people want to talk about at my local meetings. Residents are concerned about overflowing glass bins, long-abandoned food bins, and bulky items being dumped, creating public health hazards of their own.
It was understandable that services were reduced when we all went into lockdown and in fairness to the council it did well to keep the blue and green bin services running with depleted staff. But the services which were stopped also show up how the whole system isn’t really working.
Our glass bottles and jars are endlessly recyclable back into new packaging, principally for the spirits and brewing industries in Scotland. That’s a real environmental and economic success story. Similarly what’s in our food bins isn’t really waste but nutrients which can be composted to improve our soils and grow quality Scottish produce. And furniture, electricals and other bulky items can often be repaired, reused and upcycled to give them another useful life.
The fact the council can choose to stop these services, without due consideration of the knock-on impacts for others who need these materials, shows how far we are from the goal of a circular economy where nothing is ever truly wasted. If we’re serious about becoming more resilient, to deal with future pandemics or other shocks, we must make this a reality.
When services aren’t working the mantra from opposition parties is that we need to ‘get the basics right’. That’s clearly valid. For too long, the council has prioritised making services cheaper rather than designing them around people’s actual needs.
We compound that by failing to consult properly on the need to make changes and then wonder why we have low levels of buy-in from people. In part of my own ward – in a conservation area – dozens of large on-street bins were unceremoniously dumped on residents with no prior consultation right at the start of lockdown, when Councillors were less able to respond.
This attitude, of doing things to communities not with them, has to change. The council must not use the coronavirus recovery as cover to force through changes without properly engaging people first.
But it would be wrong to pin responsibility for the problems our waste causes solely on the council. We each have responsibilities as individuals to be considerate and minimise the negative impact of the things we buy and use. But more importantly, other levels of Government need to get their own basics right.
It should be “basic” for the UK Government to draft regulations which force manufacturers and retailers to take responsibility for – and work to end – the throwaway culture their business models have created. It should be ‘basic’ for the Scottish Government to give councils the powers they need to raise funds to invest in services, which could include a range of local environmental charges, like the carrier bag charge, to tackle wasteful behaviours. Decisionmakers at these levels would do well to give the same prominence to these issues as our grassroots community councils do.
THE GREEN VIEW