Huge wrote:
writes:
I monitored a refuse & recycling contract for three years. You are
right to be concerned. In the last ten to fifteen years, local
authorities have been cutting back on refuse collection services across
the board
Yet another of the large, and increasing, ways in which the State
extorts taxes for a service, then fails to provide the service. And
another example of behaviour which if it were the private sector, would
be illegal.
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It used to be that second hand car
dealers would fight over the rights to impound abandoned cars - legion
are the stories about backhanders thrown to highways inspectors in
return for scrap cars - but now no one wants them, what with the low
cost of second hand cars, so the councils charge high fees just for
scrapping a vehicle, because the car dealers don't want them anymore.
You're a tad out of date. The price of scrap steel has gone back up to the
point where it is economic to scrap cars again, hence all the ones
abandoned by the roadside have vanished.
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For years local government ignored the issue of recycling. These were
the golden days when binmen would collect anything. Then when the
horrendous cost of recycling was suddenly realised, swingeing cuts were
made to the general refuse collection service (along with cuts to
street cleaning and similar grounds maintenance work). To make matters
worse, so much is now being recycled that the value of recycled paper,
glass and metal has tumbled, meaning that local authorities get far
less income than they had budgetted for.
The message contained therein being that recycling is generally
speaking a waste of time.
--
"Other people are not your property."
[email me at huge [at] huge [dot] org [dot] uk]
Recycling is just very badly managed in this country. The Govt reacts
in a knee-jerk manner to last minute deadlines.
I recall more than one occasion when several lorry loads of paper were
landfilled because the paper mills were so swamped with incoming
material that they were unable to take it. That's the sort of cock-up
that occurs when strategists plan short-term.