JOHN CRAWFORD
JOHN trained at Saltcoats Burgh in the late 60s. After a decade he moved to PD Beatwaste Ltd/ Wimpey Waste Management Ltd. He then joined the Civil Engineering Dept at Strathclyde University before posts at Renfrew, Hamilton, Inverness and
East Ayrshire Councils. A Fellow of CIWM, he served on their Scottish Centre Council from 1988-2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland and was their President between 1991-92.
Right bag: wrong place!
I WAS a bit concerned when I saw the TV documentary about Milton Keynes Council’s recycling bags being ‘found in a Malaysian jungle’: not because I’d had anything to do with it, but I still have about 20 or so black plastic bags that bear the legend ‘East Ayrshire Council’.
These were part of a batch I think I bought around 2005 but the receipt was lost long ago. So, if we’d had a house spring-clean and took the bagged waste to our local recycling centre, what would a passing camera crew have thought if these bags were then found in the 40yd3 containers? Would the headline have been ‘Scottish council’s waste found in Lancashire dump’ (the press rarely gives our sites their correct titles)?
But why let the facts get in the way of a good story? I’d hoped the TV series ‘The secret world of your rubbish’ would avoid the media’s usual obsession to ‘beef it up’ by finding all sorts of ‘interesting’ items such as the funeral urn of ashes, the sex toys, etc, but all to no avail. In addition, we were treated to the classic demarcation of responsibilities as seen
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in ‘this is a bag of dog poo and should be for the streets sweepers’ comment where the loader threw the offending bag onto the pavement and walked away. I thought we’d stopped that nonsense years ago. Personally, I’d have warned the employee that if they did it again, they’d get a fixed penalty notice for littering.
If nothing else however, these programmes let viewers see what happens to the stuff they put in their recycling bins, how much contrary material gets in and how it’s removed (well, most of it). And that can’t be a bad thing; nor can their knowing the quantities of waste that we’re now handling in the UK every year.
Milton Keynes has now said that the number of bags they’ve issued far exceeds the number returned containing recyclate. That’s no great surprise as councils’ purchasing powers mean their bags are far cheaper than any sold in the supermarkets, so people tend to use them for all sorts of purposes. More than one council has found out in the past that some of their staff were selling
‘surplus’ (actually, stolen) plastic refuse sacks to local shopkeepers.
When we first looked at charging for commercial waste collection everybody was worried about how to prevent abuse and I recall a colleague who bragged about ‘cracking it’. His sacks were pre- printed with a unique logo and could only be bought from council offices. The cost of a sack included the collection and disposal charges so he thought it was fool-proof. Later, a shopkeeper friend of mine said he’d seen the loaders carefully empty the commercial waste bags into the hopper of the RCV, smooth the bags down and then offer them back at a discounted price! So maybe Milton Keynes is off the hook?
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