Rewards do not compromise recycling, says minister

Rewarding people for recycling is not counter-productive, communities minister Bob Neill has insisted.

Speaking at the CIWM conference in London today (June 13), Mr Neill was asked by Elizabeth Cullen, contracts manager for South Buckinghamshire council, whether rewarding residents for recycling might send out the wrong message by making people expect rewards.

Recycling rewards, such as money-off vouchers and tokens,have beenchampioned by the government sinceit came to power in 2010.

She said: Studies about rewarding people for behaviour they should do anyway have shown that it can be counter-productive. Are you concerned that we will be bringing up a generation who expect rewards?

However, the minister said that rewards were important to incentivise a change in behaviour and would not stop people from recycling out of a sense of social conscious. Heclaimed that a reward approach was better than a punitive one which punished people for putting the wrong waste in the wrong bins.

He said: In my experience most people will both want to do the decent thing and also like a financial benefit. I dont see any contradiction between the two.

Recyclebank

To back up his argument, Mr Neill cited the Royal Borough of Maidenhead, where he said the introduction of the recycling rewards system Recyclebank had boosted recycling rates by 35%.

He added: I think there is a real place for recycling reward schemes such as Recyclebank and Local Green Points. I hope we will see more of those reward schemes going forward.

Earlier in his speech, Mr Neill paid tribute to the hard work of the waste sector and gave an overview of what his department, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), is doing on waste.

DCLG

While the development of waste policy is normally the preserve of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Mr Neill said that waste collection was the most visible and basic service that local authorities provide which is why DCLG had gone involved.

He explained how his department is pushing its localism agenda which aims to puthouseholders are put at the heart of local decisions about waste and pointed to the creation of the 250 million Weekly Collection Support Scheme by communities secretary Eric Pickles.

Providing an update on the fund, for which councils had to submit expressions of interest by March 16 2012, he said : We received 166 bids and that included proposals around infrastructure and innovative incentive schemes. I think our feedback will help local authorities finalise and improve their bids before their final bids are due in on August 17th.

Mr Neill acknowledged that it was horses for courses and said the government did not want to be prescriptive and force councils to move back to weekly collections but instead needed to listen to what residents wanted.

He said: We have not sought to prescribe frequency or method of collection that would not be localism. I accept that not one size fits all. But we are making the money available to incentivise councils to tailor the schemes to their needs.

As examples of councils who had achieved success in retaining weekly collection while boosting recycling, Mr Neill pointed to Sandwell council which he said was saving 300 million over the next 25 years and would soon be recycling 60%, and Sutton which had renewed its commitment to weekly collections.