Many a Concern is raised by Press Release re Recycling
I was more than a tad concerned about the tone and content of Hounslow's press release about recycling which was posted today on the front page of the TW8 site.The unfortunate tone of the missive is typified by the threat to the person who has been sticking labels onto public bins which are officially labelled in a manner that deceives the public. In a similar vein, without presenting any evidence, Joe and Jane Public are blamed for using street bins for the disposal of domestic waste. Is this another offence and is it also punishable with a Fixed Penalty Notice and/or prosecution? What exactly is this domestic waste and how does the disposal of waste in street bins add to the problem of rubbish in the street? Perhaps many households have inappropriate or insufficient facilities or perhaps we are taking greater care not to throw waste on to our streets? (I very much doubt the latter but Hounslow Highways deserve our great appreciation for the speed with which they respond to incidents of fly-tipping.)I have no idea of the cost of the new waste and recycling depot at Southall Lane but it must have been a very significant investment. The fact that it is "state of the art" does not in itself mean that it represents the best use of resources. Is 16,000 tonnes of recycled waste a significant amount? What would be the implications of the introduction of a successful deposit scheme for plastic and glass bottles? Other statistics in the press release are almost meaningless when they are presented without any context. For example, we are told that the new scheme was rolled out to 75,000 households but from another part of the Hounslow website we learn that in 2017 there were about 95,000 households in Hounslow. This suggests that just over 20% of households have no, or minimal, recycling facilities.The recycling rate apparently increased from 29.8% in 2016/2017 to 33.2% in September 2017. With such a large investment we should jolly well hope for an improvement but statistics for a single month cannot be compared with those for an entire financial year.Statistics on recycling appear to vary from one source to another. For example Letsrecycle.com has Hounslow's rate for 2016/17 as 30.1%. What appears to be clear is that Hounslow's performance in that year was significantly worse than in any of our neighbouring London Boroughs with the single exception of Hammersmith and Fulham (23.2%). In 2016/17 Ealing appears to have achieved a rate of 50.7%, Hillingdon 43.4% and Richmond 42.4%. There are many social and geographical reasons for these variations but it would certainly appear that all is not well in the state of Hounslow. Who now believes that we will achieve the target of 50% by 2020?Our own household has been almost obsessive in its recycling efforts for many years but we have now concluded that a much more logical and effective approach is to reduce consumption and, where this is impossible, to re-use before recycling.
Jim Storrar ● 2867d6 Comments