The Daily Mail newspaper reported on the Burnley case yesterday. The paper and its sister title the Mail on Sunday have featured a number of cases recently where councils are reported to have acted in a tough way over residents who are not recycling in the correct manner.
The latest case features a 78 year old pensioner who has multiple sclerosis. The Daily Mail reported the incident as “recycling police threaten pensioner with 1,000 fine” for putting an orange juice carton in the recycling sack.
” The last thing we want to do is upset residents, especially those that are trying to recycle as much as possible.“
– Helen Ryder, Burnley's rethinking waste officer A spokesman for the council told letsrecycle.com that letters had been sent out to a number of people who had been contaminating sacks and the letter did include a warning that failure to comply with section 46 of the Environmental Protection Act could lead to a 1,000 fine.
Residents
The council had sent the letter to the pensioner because the cartons could contaminate the cardboard. However, Helen Ryder, Burnley’s rethinking waste officer, said: “The last thing we want to do is upset residents, especially those that are trying to recycle as much as possible. We appreciate they are trying to help and thanks to their support our recycling rates have rocketed.
“Burnley Council added cardboard and textile collections to its recycling service 12 months ago in response to calls from the public. The claret bags are provided to people to collect clean cardboard and clean textiles in.
“However, in recent months we’ve had increasing problems with some people putting other rubbish in the bags. It’s impractical to separate the clean cardboard and textiles from other waste.
“A whole lorry load of recyclable materials can be contaminated and tonnes of cardboard and textiles that could be recycled have to be dumped in a landfill site instead because they are mixed in with other rubbish. Around 10 tonnes of contaminated cardboard each week is being thrown away rather than being recycled.”
Criticism
The fact that the council has acted over the placing of liquid cartons in cardboard recycling bags has attracted some criticism from the paper recycling sector.
One expert told letsrecyle.com that he doubted there would be any problem with a few cartons in a load. “Cardboard recyclers can handle a certain amount of cartons and at least one board recycler has introduced new shredding machinery in recent years. It is unfortunate that the council seem to be stopping someone actually doing recycling.”
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A waste management company recycling expert said: “I think this shows some of the difficulties in recycling as many materials as possible but Tetrapak and other carton manufacturers need to do more to help get their containers recycled. Some of them even say they can be recycled when it is quite hard to do this.”
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