Recycle properly or you lose your bins
Families have been warned they risk losing their rubbish bins if they fail to dispose of waste correctly. Hull council is spending £100,000 of public funds to hire consultants to teach residents how to recycle after it claimed householders are “contaminating” recycling bins by failing to wash out containers, such as baked bean tins, which then leak on to cardboard and paper and cost £600,000 a year to put right.
FAMILIES have been warned by a council that they risk losing their rubbish bins if they fail to dispose of waste correctly.
The council is spending £100,000 of public funds to hire consultants to teach residents how to recycle.
It claims householders are “contaminating” recycling bins by failing to wash out containers, such as baked bean tins, which then leak on to cardboard and paper and cost £600,000 a year to sort out.
The authority is in the process of taking the blue recycling bins away from 2,150 residents who have failed to heed their request, while warning letters have been sent to another 16,000.
One senior Hull councillor defended the move but admitted the idea of a “rubbish police” would not go down well. John Black, who oversees refuse collection, did not rule out “awareness courses” for those who flout the rules, if that is suggested by the consultants.
Other councils have installed cameras to ensure residents only put their bins out on collection day, or used microchips to monitor recycling levels.
Mr Black said: “It has come down to a tin of beans. But it does not take a minute to rinse a few beans out or get as much tomato sauce and salad cream out the jar as possible. On the other hand, we don’t want to cut our noses off to spite our faces.
“It does not go down well with the public having a kind of rubbish police roaming around the streets trying to catch people.”
He said the council “needs to be aware of the consequences” of confiscating the bins. Recycling waste is the cheapest form of disposal, he said, and “better for the environment too”.
It is assumed that if the council confiscates bins, residents will take items to recycling centres themselves. But it may just be thrown out with the rest of the rubbish.
The council said “wet food waste put in recycling bins contaminates paper and card which is then refused by the recycling contractor”. Nappies, food, black plastic bags containing rubbish meant for other bins, textiles and “hard plastic” has also caused problems.
Because of the cost of disposing of poorly prepared recycling, the council considers spending £100,000 on consultants an investment.
“When our blue bin contents are tipped out at the recycling facility, you can see how such a small amount of wet food waste not only contaminates the dry cardboard so it can’t be recycled, but also voids the entire contents of the blue bin, which has the knock-on effect of creating the extra costs for general waste disposal,” a spokesman said.
Dia Chakravarty, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “It’s extraordinary that it’s come to a point where expensive consultants need to be hired to deal with the situation.”