This is going to be a rubbish column – a dad joke for you to introduce the pungent subject of recycling bins. It’s a reminder that the 4 July general election cannot fix all of our everyday issues, the stuff that concerns and bothers us on a daily basis. Depending on where you live, these may include – but are not limited to – local housing, crime without consequences, potholes and waste collections.
So, the bins: apparently, my local council is going to deliver four of them, of different shapes and sizes, to me in the coming days.
Every time we receive a communication from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, residents hope that it’s going to be about the elephant on the river: the bridge across the Thames, which has been closed to traffic for five years, making us an international laughing stock.
Instead, by contrast with the tumbleweed about the bridge, a massive pamphlet was delivered about the “new bins arriving for rubbish, recycling and food waste”. We are to receive “a seven-litre indoor food waste caddy, with a larger 23-litre outdoor container” to put our food waste into for collection. Then there is a 140-litre general refuse bin and a 240-litre recycling bin. However, that’s only if there is suitable outdoor space and we live in a “kerb-side property”. Oh, and “some homes may also prefer to share bins with neighbours”.
On collection days we should manoeuvre the bins, filled to the brim with our loose waste, to “near the pavement, but not on the pavement”. However, the council “cannot collect from our gardens”. We are to wash our plastic packaging before disposal and garden waste is to remain in up to five loose plastic bags – but not big items. Our outside food waste bin needs to be “locked”, in order to outwit cunning local foxes and other animals.
It is unclear whether the council believes we are all Lords and Ladies with front drives leading up to our palatial homes, but my reality is a terraced house with a tiny front garden, in which there currently resides proudly a single, multi-purpose bin.
To be clear, I am pro-recycling. But a quarter of a century since it became a common practice, why isn’t there a more universally accessible system of doing so in the UK that does not require such complicated changes to people’s daily habits?
There has been huge progress since 2000 when we were the worst recyclers in Europe, with a derisory rate in England of 12 per cent, but we still lag behind international recycling leaders like Germany, Italy and Sweden.
Although there was dramatic growth until 2015 in our levels of recycling, this growth has fallen in the subsequent years. The 2022 rate was 43 per cent, while Germany’s was around 67 per cent.
I find it difficult to understand why successive governments, both local and national, have been unable to find a simple narrative around recycling that wins residents’ hearts as well as minds. If you’re asking us to be inconvenienced on a daily basis, it has to be for something that we believe will work for the general good.