The demand comes as the county seeks new funding from the Executive's Strategic Waste Fund, and is a result of Aberdeenshire reaching recycling/composting rates of only 13% in 2003/04.
The Scottish Executive wants the council to focus more on reaching its 25% recycling target for 2006, calling Aberdeenshire's current approach to waste “no longer acceptable”.
Among budget cuts, the Executive wants the council to drop one fly-tipping squad, one bulky-uplift collection crew and five other members of staff. It is thought that a proposed new waste treatment plant may also have to be dropped to meet the Executive's demands.
The Aberdeenshire councillor responsible for waste, Martin Ford, said he believed the Executive was doing the wrong thing. He said: “I remain wholly unconvinced by the shift to recycling and continue to feel that our thrust towards waste reduction was right.”
Resistance
At a meeting of the council's infrastructure service committee last week, members resisted the Executive's requests and pledged that waste awareness issues should remain part of Aberdeenshire's plans.
They agreed to further projects such as bringing forward kerbside-collection targets by more than two years. The committee instructed council officers to report its decision to keep the waste awareness programme to the Executive, and waste minimisation officer Pam Walker told letsrecycle.com the report would go to Executive “hopefully within the next couple of weeks as we really need to get things moving.”
She added that she expected other Scottish councils to be given the same treatment by the Executive over the next year or so.
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