CRAWFORD’S RAMBLINGS ON WASTE
Crawford’s Ramblings on waste
Communication is it? By John Crawford
A candid, pragmatic and occasionally irreverent view of current waste management issues from someone who doesn’t have to worry about promotion or clients!
It was the 1995 festive season in Inverness, my third with the council. We’d tried everything possible to cater for two public holidays falling in two consecutive weeks, trying to provide as much continuity of service as possible, given we’re on weekly collections. At 9.02am on Wednesday 27th December, the phone rings. ‘Are you the clown in charge
of the refuse collection service?’ ‘Yes, but I’ve stopped
wearing baggy trousers, a red nose and great big shoes. How can I help you?’ ‘Why weren’t our bins emptied
on Monday? And I don’t like your tone by the way. You’re obviously not an Invernesian by the sound of your voice.’ ‘Actually I’m from the West of
Scotland. Monday was Christmas Day and we were on holiday.’ We’d asked you to present your wheeled bin for collection last Saturday.’ ‘This is outrageous. The lazy
b*ggers you employ get enough holidays as it is. Why weren’t we informed about this?’ ‘Well the crews hand-
delivered letters to every home affected by the Christmas holidays.’ ‘Nonsense, we never received
any letter from you. And, are you saying people who normally get their refuse collected on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays aren’t affected?’ ‘We try to keep the disruption
to a minimum, so your waste will be collected next Saturday.
‘Since early November, we’ve also had large notices on our refuse collection vehicles with the revised arrangements for the festive season collections.’ ‘A waste of time for anybody
like me who is working when our rubbish is collected. Are your men being paid overtime to work these Saturdays?’ ‘We also took adverts in the
three local papers explaining the revised collections over the festive season. And you can’t expect people to work at weekends without being paid overtime.’ ‘Well it’s not good enough and
you’ll need to come up with a better idea next year. Have you any idea how much I’m paying in council tax?’ ‘The annual cost of your
collection and disposal service is around £170 so I don’t receive much of your council tax.’ ‘Who is your superior? I’m not
going to be spoken to like this….’! But how far are councils
expected to go to inform householders when their waste services are being altered? It’s nearly three decades since most Scottish councils changed from a backdoor collection of plastic sacks to wheeled bins, allowing them to reduce collection crew sizes because the labour element for getting the refuse from the back door to the kerbside was transferred to the householder. The savings in crew sizes paid for the cost of the new bins. But the new 240l wheeled
bins held a lot more waste than the ‘two or three’ sacks collected previously, especially when householders worked out how to cram more waste into the bin when the lid wouldn’t close. Collection round tonnages increased by as much as 20% in some cases. It also meant that at public holidays, councils now had to tell householders about their
revised collection arrangements. Ideally, it’s best to keep the
disruption to a minimum – if the employees are prepared to work Boxing Day and 2nd January, there’s only one day to worry about (usually deferring the regular collection to either the previous or next Saturday). But even for Inverness, this still meant over 6,000 householders had to be told about the altered collection arrangements, as described above. But, of course there are
always the armchair experts who use the local press to point out how much better it could have been organised, eg
‘doesn’t the council appreciate we all have far more waste at this time of the year and why don’t they organise extra collections?’ (Actually everything is being done to keep the existing service going) or ‘I don’t see why if Christmas Day falls on a Monday, the crews couldn’t collect Monday’s waste on Tuesday; Tuesday’s waste on Wednesday etc. Aren’t these officials supposed to be professionally trained?’ So it’s little wonder that new
waste and recycling collection schemes take time to bed in, and householders have to learn that the cellophane wrapping and the CD that was in their Sunday newspapers shouldn’t be put in the paper and cardboard recycling container. My favourite story is from a
colleague who had an irate householder on the phone complaining his garden waste bin hadn’t been emptied, ‘You put a bicycle in the bin’ he was told ‘This bin is for green waste.’ The householder’s indignant reply, ‘It was a green bike…!’
John Crawford originally trained in municipal engineering in a Clyde Coast Burgh in the late 60s. After a decade there he moved to PD Beatwaste Ltd (afterwards Wimpey Waste Management Ltd). He then joined the Civil Engineering Dept at Strathclyde University before holding senior waste management posts at Renfrew, Hamilton, Inverness and East Ayrshire Councils. He is a Fellow of CIWM, and served on its Scottish Centre Council from 1988-2009.
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SHM December 2015/January 2016 Issue 121
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