Burnt recycling

Whilst waiting for my first recycling collection of the year — the snowy weather has lead to the cancellation of the previous two — I’ve been browsing through Swindon Borough Council’s cabinet paper on plans for incinerating cooking Swindon’s rubbish. I couldn’t help but notice that rather a lot of what is sent for recycling seems not to be recycled.

The principal risk is how it deals with household waste, however, there is evidence that it will at least manage the residual waste from the Recycling Centre…. To fully manage our entire waste stream, an additional two units, on top of the three funded through this case, are required.

That rather reads as though the majority of the first two units will be used to burn leftovers from recycling. With 50% of Swindon’s rubbish actually being recycled, just how much more than that 50% is having to be weeded out? And given the oft claimed high quality of Swindon’s recyclables, just how little of what people elsewhere think they’re recycling is actually going to landfill?

Fly-tipping spin

If Mr Palacio of Swindon Borough Council is to be believed, the increase in fly-tipping in Swindon is because his team is doing more to clear it away.

Richard Palacio, Swindon Council’s environmental enforcement manager, said the increased number of reports of flytipping was down to extra resources being deployed by the council to combat the problem.

That’s as logical as the streets and alleyways of central Swindon are clean. The statistics announced by Defra show an increase in enforcement by councils across the country, not just in Swindon, yet there has been an 8% increase in recorded fly-tipping in Swindon, compared with a 9% decrease nationally.

Either Mr Palacio’s team are highly ineffective, or he’s talking rubbish in more ways than one.

Recycled disorganisation

Less than two weeks before a change to their recycling service, Swindon Borough Council has only just started to publicise the change. A story in the Adver tells us of the change.

The move is in response to residents’ irritation that only plastic bottles can be collected as part of the council’s recycling process. But from July 1 yoghurt pots, margarine tubs, take-away containers and much more can all be bagged up for the council to collect…. The only plastic that cannot be collected under the new scheme is black plastic because it cannot be separated from other colours by the waste processors the rubbish is sent to.

Residents are asked to put their mixed plastics into clear or white plastic sacks which can be bought at supermarkets. They can also use the council’s clear bags for plastic bottles, although no more will be delivered.

The new collection will be on the same day as residents’ wheelie bin collections. For those on weekly blue bag collections it will be the same day as the green waste and plastic bottle collections.

I wouldn’t usually quote at such length, but at the moment this is the only information we have on the change. In its very limited wisdom, the council has not yet put any information about the change on its website. If the council really wants people to recycle more, they need to make rather more effort to publicise these changes. It seems they’ve learnt nothing from the farcical publicity that accompanied the introduction of wheelie bins and weekly recycling collections.

A high-tech bonfire

A company planning to build an incinerator a wood-burning energy generator at Park Grounds Farm near Wootton Bassett would like people to believe it is something better than an incinerator. According to Mr Overfield, the chief executive of Purepower Holdings, it’s much more high-tech than that.

This is certainly not an incinerator. An incinerator is basically a glorified bonfire, whereas this is a piece of advanced technology that can transform the wood brought to the site into enough energy to power 5,000 homes.

So in what way is this different from an incinerator. Again, according to Mr Overfield, it’s advanced!

This is advanced conversion technology, which basically sees the wood heated up to 1,000 degrees. The wood becomes a gas and we put that gas into an engine that uses that as a fuel to power generators.

Hmm…. Perhaps Mr Overfield should have a word with the people at SITA UK ltd who know a thing or two about incinerators, having plans of their own for ‘Energy-from-Waste’ facilities. Here’s the SITA description of their process.

Inside the furnace, a series of grate bars move the waste through the furnace where it is dried and burned at temperatures of around 1000 °C. Burning waste in the furnace creates 2 different materials:

• Hot flue gas – which is then used to create energy. This is known as renewable energy.
• Incinerator Bottom Ash – which can be used in construction.

That’s an incinerator producing gas at 1000 °C, unlike Purepower’s ‘Advanced Conversion Technology’, which is something-too-high-tech-to-be-called-an-incinerator creating gas at 1000 °C. If you’re not convinced that this is an incinerator, look at what the equipment supplier at Purepower’s other bonfire power plant project manufacture: furnaces.

incinerator noun a furnace for burning rubbish

I suspect that to Mr Overfield, something that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, is not a duck but an advanced amphibious aeronautic organism.

Cleaning up

It’s all very well Mr Wright suggesting that local Police Community Support Officers be given the power to give fixed penalties to dog owners who don’t clean-up their dog’s excrement, but the PCSOs are already fully stretched and have other important priorities, such as drugs and other anti-social behaviour. If forced to make a choice, which we are, I’d rather they were dealing with those issues.

I’m also not convinced by Mr Wright’s view that it’s a serious problem in the Railway Village. In Faringdon Road Park, yes, but not the Railway Village. And at the time when most of the dog walkers are around, early morning and early evening, I’ve not once seen a PCSO in the area… but I have seen most, though not all, dog owners cleaning-up after their pets.

Not quite found her vocation

I see that Ms Snelgrove has been assisting her red nest colleagues in tidying my local area. The reasons given are all very laudable. Ms Snelgrove:

The problem is that litter attracts more litter. We want to make sure the canal walk is free from litter and we think it is part of our civic duty. We want to set an example and help keep Swindon a lovely place to live.

Mr Montaut:

We want to make the public aware that communities need to work together to keep areas clean. The cost of cleaning waste is high and there needs to be a cycle of change to keep areas clean.

Mr Wright:

We can all do a small part to help put things right. It is as simple as that.

All good stuff and nothing anyone could disagree with… except I’m not sure it is quite so simple. Canal Walk is one of the better maintained parts of Westcott, with regular visits from the council’s cleaners. If their intention was to encourage the community to keep the area clean, why so little publicity in advance of Saturday’s outing? Were they frightened of being joined by members of the public other than party activists? And if she regards it as part of her ‘civic duty’, can we expect to see Ms Snelgrove back cleaning the streets when the cameras aren’t around?

If they really wanted to make an impression on the area, rather than seeking a photo opportunity, their time would have been much better spent encouraging those whose garages face onto Canal Walk to take up the council’s offer of cleaning off the graffiti that defaces Canal Walk to a much greater extent than litter ever does.

Not so smart

I’m a little puzzled about what the significance of Swindon Borough Council’s StreetSmart initiative really is. The puff for it in the Adver gives the impression of a great coming together of services: parts of two departments merged into one.

Until now, the services grouped under the StreetSmart banner operated separately in two council directorates – transport and environment and leisure.

As far as I can tell, they still do. What’s changed, according to the StreetSmart page on the council’s website, are the arrangements for contacting some of them.

StreetSmart brings together, under the StreetSmart team at the Swindon Direct Contact Centre, all the services which keep the Borough’s streets and open spaces looking tidy and well tended. It also provides just one point of contact for those services

So that’s a bit more co-ordination of the teams, a lot of rebranding — addresses and titles of pages on the website renamed to include the new brand and a main page with a pretty little logo at the bottom and a not-so-pretty logo at the top — but still two separate departments. And if it’s taken this initiative to provide a single contact number for these services, just what has Swindon Direct been doing since its creation earlier this year?

Swindon Direct was meant to provide a single point for council services. It was already the one number you could call about all the services now covered by StreetSmart. And the ‘new’ number for StreetSmart has been in use since Swindon Direct was created, but as the direct dial number just for waste & recycling. If your problem is with car park maintenance, do you now call the StreetSmart number or the Car Parking number of Swindon Direct?

It seems the council has already recreated the problem that Swindon Direct was meant to solve.

Black is the new orange

I see that the railway village has been kitted out with new black boxes to replace the original orange recycling boxes. I presume it’s been done to reduce their visible impact in this historic area, but a pair of large black boxes are just as obvious as a pair of orange ones. As they seem to have been specially ordered for the area, I wonder if anyone considered making them a pale brown colour to better blend with the stone facades of the houses?

Freezers to replace wheelie bins

Just a week after Swindon Borough Council suggested doubling the number of plastic bags used for throwing away rubbish, we now have an even less efficient suggestion from a local resident: freeze your rubbish, then put it in your wheelie the night before collection. Ms Harris, whose idea this is, seems to be rather proud of her ‘logic’ in coming up with this idea.

I’ve done it ever since I’ve had a wheelie bin and I’ve never had maggots. It was an idea I just came up with myself. My husband says I apply logic to everything and it doesn’t always work, but this does.

It’s such a great idea, I’m thinking of buying an industrial freezer and providing, for a reasonable fee, maggot protection services to my neighbours…. On second thoughts, perhaps not. Let’s examine Ms Harris’ logic.

It’s simple. Instead of throwing away old plastic containers, that you get things like strawberries in, keep them. Put all your scrap foods and bits and bobs from your plate into the container…

That assumes you buy sufficient amounts of overpackaged food to store the scrap food in. It also assumes that the problem waste is sufficiently dry not to leak out of the container.

then put them in the corner of the freezer.

The corner of the freezer? Just how big a freezer is this? Someone cooking meals daily could easily generate more than just a ‘corner’ of waste in one fortnight. Those not doing serious cooking but reheating pre-packaged food are likely to have large amounts of bulky soiled packaging even less suitable for this treatment. And placing waste in proximity to waste: I’m sure the Health & Safety wonks would have a fit about that. Freezing significantly slows the decay process, it doesn’t totally stop it.

Anything frozen will not attract vermin or maggots or anything.

In a fortnight, true, but until it freezes you’ve got waste potentially oozing whatever contamination it already has over food in the freezer.

I’ve done it ever since I’ve had a wheelie bin and I’ve never had maggots.

There’s as much sense to that as there would be to burning all food just to avoid the risk of it being undercooked. Admittedly, the council’s own suggestion of double-wrapping rubbish is not much better.

According to Swindon Borough Council’s own figures, each week’s rubbish collection costs less than 75p per household.* Anything that costs more to prevent the maggot infestations is a step backwards in efficiency from the well-known Victorian solution to the problem.†

*Up to 1 tonne of rubbish per household per year with the cost of collection in 2004/05 (in the era of weekly collections) £38.62 per tonne.
†Yes, I know just a minority of households have suffered wheelie bin infestation, but the council’s advise is to everyone, not just the afflicted few.

Double-bagging

What do you do if you’re worried about getting maggots in your wheelie? According to Swindon Borough Council you wrap them up well, twice.

Food waste shouldn’t be left uncovered in the house, as it can attract flies to lay eggs on it before it goes into the bin, so it’s best to place it immediately in the bin, securely and preferably double-wrapped.

So that’s the council recommending that you increase what you throw away. Rubbish will have never been so well cosseted. If as the council claim,

Wheelie bin lids, if kept tightly closed, prevent flies from getting at the contents.

why the need for double-wrapping?

A big cleaning bill

I find Swindon Borough Council’s approach to fly-posting both half-hearted and inefficient.

The cost of removing a poster zip-tied to a tree or lamp-post is about £20 while a poster fixed to another surface could cost up to £200…. Mr Palacio said: “We are keen to stress that we are not trying to ban anyone from putting up posters – we just want to make sure that they are not left lying around for ages after the event is over.”

I can see that something that is very firmly glued in place may be expensive to remove, given the staff time and equipment needed — steam cleaning, for example. But £20 to remove a poster tied to a tree? Even if this includes the cost of someone at the council’s contact centre dealing with a report first, there must be a very inefficient process between the first report and the final snip to remove the poster to run-up a bill of £20. And why wait until after the event to get tough with the culprits? Fly-posting of the type shown in the Adver’s story is unsightly from the moment it is posted, not just several months later.

Measuring success

If the only measure of success for a project is that it meets its principle objective then, as rather inaccurately reported in the Adver, the changes to waste and recycling collections in Swindon have been a success, with an almost 60% increase in recycling*. However, a project also needs to be measured by what other effects it has and any well-managed project will have a number of other, secondary, criteria for success. Complaint levels of ‘20 or 30 a day’ may be low compared with the reported number of collections, 860,000 per month, but without a comparison with the number of complaints before the changes, is no measure of success. And if Mr Harcourt believes that ‘Swindon is now a tidier town’ then he’s clearly not set foot on the streets of central Swindon.

*Unlike the Adver report, I do know how to do percentages: an increase in the recycling rate from 27.3% to 43.5% is an increase in the recycling rate of just over 16 percentage points, or an increase of almost 60 per cent.

An invisible team: local elections 2008 round 2

Yesterday I received a letter through the post from Ms Snelgrove. Not the most local affair, having been printed in London and with a return address on the envelope in Newcastle upon Tyne. Apparently, she’s had an

Action Team in Central to listen to your concerns about anti-social behaviour and the mounting rubbish on your streets.

The letter even solicits for volunteers to her ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’. Ms Snelgrove seems not to realise that listening is not itself action. Even if it were, her ‘team’ have been most noticeable by their absence. The rubbish is now subsiding, especially since the council started putting little orange ‘Council aware’ labels on bags of rubbish left for days on the streets. The rubbish was ‘mounting’ on the streets several months ago, when Ms Snelgrove’s ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’ didn’t even exist… not that there’s any evidence it exists at all. There’s no evidence of in on the local red nest’s website, nor on Ms Snelgrove’s.

The only things that are mounting now are the local election campaigns… and Ms Snelgrove’s hypocrisy. Real action speaks much louder than words.

Passing the wheelie

I’m not overly interested in what the reasons may be for Mr Wren’s decision to prematurely leave his post as cabinet member for local environment on Swindon Borough Council. (Whatever the reason, I’m sure any formal announcement will include an attempt at humour of the ‘following the successful introduction of borough-wide kerbside recycling…’ variety.) Let’s just hope that his proposed successor, Mr Mattock starts with a little humility by admitting that the introduction of wheelie bins and blue bags for non-recyclable waste has poorly implemented.

The first step to improving services is admitting that they are not as good as they could, or should, be. The first step to learning how to make those improvements is admitting that mistakes were made.

How long will blue bags last?

With rubbish collections due tomorrow in this area, I see that, quite apart from the ‘no more black bags’ message having not got through, the ‘only two blue bags per week’ message still hasn’t got through to many households either: there are some with over twice that number put out for collection… regularly. And as the dustmen, whilst refusing to collect black bags, seem to quite contentedly collect any number of blue bags, I reckon that some people will soon be running out. At which point, they’ll revert to using black bags… which won’t be collected. Swindon in the spring is going to look so pretty….

Fantasy

I’m not sure what Mr Glaholm is on, but it is clearly strong stuff. His suggestion on how to solve the problems with waste and recycling collections is pure fantasy.

I think what we need now is for Anne Snelgrove to call for a public meeting on this. She’s the one person with the connections that could make it happen and who could be viewed as independent by both sides.

There are many things Ms Snelgrove may be but, as her ignominious voting record in the House of Commons and her many partisan interventions in local politics show, she is neither independent nor seen as such. She’s already had her say on this topic, and it was little more than a party-political jibe.

Mr Glaholm’s other thought on this subject, that the change in waste and recycling collections would have been much more successful if done area by area is also based on an assumption which, for this council, is just plain wrong.

When I was on that working party I suggested that rather than a blanket roll-out we should do it slowly, but I was told the council had the bins in West Swindon and knew what would happen. But it was a mistake. Rolling out everywhere at the same time meant that we learned as we went along – instead of looking at areas where we could learn from best practice.

The evidence so far is that the council has no interest in learning anything from its mistakes and prefers to flatly deny that any mistakes were made.

A clean sweep for the new year?

I doubt that the streets of Swindon will be getting off to a clean, fresh start in the New Year. The pile of rubbish outside 41 Westcott Place continues to grow. It has now been there for almost two months. As already found in Broadgreen, there’s not much evidence of the instant action promised by Ms Darker against ‘fly-tipping’.

A wheelie success…

I see from the December edition of Central Outlook that Ms Darker is having a few problems with the English language.

Fly-tipping In Central
Residents have complained to me that some irresponsible people are dumping their black bags. Our officers have been through the black bags and have ascertained names and addresses of those guilty of dumping and they will be prosecuted. The wheelie bin rollout has been hugely successful and I hope residents will contact me with details of any dumping so that we can tackle this immediately. I fully support the Council policy to introduce wheelie bins. We face the threat of a fine from Government if we don’t meet our target to recycle and and reduce landfill. This fine could be as much as 6 – 7% on Council Tax so we are determined to reach our target.

Someone should contact the Oxford English Dictionary, to advise them to add ‘chaotic and incompetent’ to the definition of ‘successful’.

Where’s the rubbish go?

I see that the latest pronouncements from Swindon Borough Council on their rubbish collections over the Christmas period has sparked off more speculation over whether what is collected for ‘recycling’ is actually recycled or still goes to landfill anyway. I can’t readily find anything that states what happens to Swindon’s rubbish after collection, but what I have found is that a fair bit of Dorset’s rubbish (the aluminium and some of the paper, to be precise) ends up being recycled in Swindon.

Jumping on the refuse wagon

With it being less than a month since Swindon Borough Council introduced weekly kerbside recycling, it’s far too early to draw conclusions as to its impact… unless you’re Ms Snelgrove that is. We can, as always, rely on Ms Snelgrove to jump in with a bit of cheap political point scoring.

Figures I have seen have Swindon Council’s recycling and composting rate at 32 per cent, and it is excellent that they are doing what they are doing. But when you look at Wiltshire County Council it is recycling 38 per cent of the waste it collects. So although it looks like we’re doing okay what we need to be doing is exceeding our targets. MPs need to keep the pressure on our councils so that they beat their targets quickly and we can all reduce our carbon footprints.

Recycling is about re-use of materials; reducing carbon footprint is about reducing energy consumption. Ms Snelgrove isn’t the first to assume the two are inextricably linked, but for her to restate it does highlight her ignorance of the issues.

Mr Bluh, leading the defence for the council, has, presumably, seen some more up-to-date figures than Ms Snelgrove has.

We’ve already achieved 38 per cent currently, and that will climb once the new service has settled down.

You may also recall Ms Snelgrove’s previous statement that she always puts the concerns of her electorate first. Compare and contrast.

Ms Snelgrove:

One of the big problems we have in this town is that the main recycling point we have is in the northern part of the borough. I think we need a new facility in the south of the borough. It could be a one-off capital project. Once up and running it would not cost too much to maintain and it would make a huge difference to the amount we recycle. We all know the council is receiving a fair amount of cash from building works – I cannot think of a better issue to put money into.

Mr Bluh:

All the changes we’ve made this year have cost the council an extra £2m to introduce, yet we’ve had no financial assistance from the Government to do it…. When we consulted residents about what they thought our priorities for waste should be, they placed a comprehensive kerbside recycling service for the whole borough, including plastic bottles, above a second waste site. We’ve now delivered that.

I suppose it should come as no surprise really that Ms Snelgrove is trying to spend more of our money and would no doubt be the first to complain if council tax had to rise to deliver her plans. That said, there couldn’t be a more apt monument to Ms Snelgrove than a centre for collecting and recycling rubbish. I trust she’ll be at the front of the queue when it opens, with copies of most of her press statements and parliamentary speaches.

The introduction of the new recycling service may have been incompetent, but in picking her latest target for petty political point scoring, Ms Snelgrove has totally missed the main concerns of her electorate.