As people will be aware from the media Bury Council has announced that it intends to become the ONLY council in the country to undertake three-weekly collections of the the ‘normal’ grey bins.

The change would also meant that our green and blue bins move to three weekly (currently they are every four weeks). Brown bins and food ‘caddys’ would stay at 2 weekly. Some flats would stay at two-weekly collections for grey bins as 3 weekly is apparently impractical. The change would take place in October this year.

Background
Just so people know the announcement came as much as a surprise to opposition (i.e. non-Labour) councillors as it did to the general public. The first time many councillors found out about this was watching BBC North West last Thursday!

The report should have been published during the day of Wednesday 9 July; its publication was delayed until after newspaper and media deadlines for the following day had passed meaning there was only ‘one side’ of the story on radio, TV and the Bury Times the next day.

Lib Dem councillor Tim Pickstone even had to ASK for opposition councillors to be given a briefing note so we could respond to local residents who were contacting us – this finally arrived 5 days after the announcement. There is no consultation with local residents. You will not remember the Labour candidates proposing this before the election six weeks ago (they didn’t mention it in their leaflets…..)

There are two reasons why the Council is proposing to do this:

– increase recycling rates
In Bury at the moment 47.6% of our household waste is recycled. This is already one of the highest levels in Greater Manchester (3rd highest), but the Council believes that this figure can increase to over 60% by 2016.

– save money
All public services are having to save money and local government is no exception. the Council believes it will save £862,000 a year by moving to a three weekly bin collection.

The full report to Cabinet is here.

What will happen now

The decision will be taken by the Council’s Cabinet on Wednesday (16 July 2014). This Committee is made up of six Labour councillors.

There is the potential for this decision to be ‘called in’ for scrutiny which we will support if the decision goes ahead.

Over the weekend Lib Dems in Bury have been consulting with local residents to find out your views on this important issue. We’ve had a brilliant response and will letting people know the outcome before the meeting tomorrow night.

I am really interested to know your views on this subject and we have set up a quick online survey to gather people’s views and ideas on this subject.

Please take a minute to fill in the survey here.

What would we do differently?

Liberal Democrats have always been huge supporters of recycling but we are opposed to three-weekly bin collections.

Every household is different but three weeks is a long time for waste to be left lying in our bins. We all know what a bin can smell like after two weeks in the summer. If you’re away when the bin gets collected then its going to be SIX weeks between bin collections….

Instead we would like to look at other options to increase recycling:
– The Council has been hugely successful in encouraging people to have smaller grey bins (its been free to have a smaller grey bin for a couple of years). For some households – particularly where there is just one or two people – this works really well. What can we do to encourage more people to do this?

– having a slightly smaller grey bin for everyone collected very two weeks would be estimated to save almost the same amount of money (£720,000 a year) – but it would mean the Council having to borrow the buy the bins in the first place BUT some larger households might not be able accommodate all their waste?

– What more could be done to encourage households to recycle more: more education?, some form of incentives? work with our local supermarkets to reduce the amount of packaging that we take home?

– Some Councils have done things to encourage garden composting – some even give people a free composter to reduce the amount of garden (and vegetable) waste that ends up in the brown bins or food caddies (obviously only works if you’ve got a garden!)

There will be other ideas so please let us know your views.

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