Birmingham's Waste Plans Revealed
For many years, we've been attacking the Council's atrocious record on recycling,
providing comments and suggestions via consultation processes and have been comprehensively
ignored.
So here is my current take on what the Council plans for the future of waste
in Birmingham. Birmingham has an obligation to meet government targets of 18%
by 2004/5 and, with the inducement of extra money from the government, has adopted
a voluntary target of 17% by 2003/4.
So, they are committed to meeting these minimum targets for recycling - a good
thing you might say. The big question is how?
If you're a keen observer of local waste and recycling, you may know that in 1994,
the city council signed a contract with the Tyseley Waste Disposal Company, TWD
(a.k.a. the people who run the incincerator).
What almost nobody knows is the degree to which this contract is biased in favour
of TWD and against the citizens of Birmingham. For instance, the Council has
around 500K Tonnes of domestic waste to dispose of each year, the incinerator
has a capacity of 350K Tonnes. The contract specifies that around 95% of the
waste (all but 25K tonnes) collected from your door by the Council must be delivered
to TWD - and the Council must pay them to take it!
This contract has two major knock-on effects:
1) Signing such a contract was obviously a colossal mistake, and goes some way
to explaining the council's general attitude over recent years of "doing-down" recycling
and promoting incineration.
2) Given that they have to deliver 95% of their domestic waste collection to
an incinerator company, how can the council meet their recycling targets?
There are three main options. The first is to renegotiate the contract - but
then the question is "what's in it for TWD"? The second is to get another organisation
to fund the collection and get around the contract that way. However, any recycling
organisation taking this on will effectively be subsidising the Council by reducing
the waste they have to pay TWD to take. In most places, it's the Council which
subsidises the recycling collection, not the other way round!
Combining these, gives a third option - to get TWD (or Onyx, their parent company)
to run the recycling collection. This already happens in Sheffield - but they've
got a recycling record even worst than ours!
One proposal on the table is for a dirty recycling scheme, in which mixed materials
are placed in "pink bags" and collected in the same trucks as the other rubbish.
and taken to a "Dirty Materials Recycling Facility". Here the pink bags are separated,
ripped open and the contents dropped onto a conveyer-belt and sorted by operators
in masks and gloves. However, the bags tend to split in the crusher-vehicles
used to collect them, a lot of material is contaminated and therefore not recycled,
and the lack of kerbside separation means no feedback to householders. Overall,
the jobs are lower quality, the recovered materials are lower quality and there's
no knock-on reduction of total waste.
So what do we want? Kerbside collection of all recyclable materials, with separation
at source. Other Councils can do it, so surely Birmingham, famed for its innovation
over the years, can do it too.
Andy Pryke
Planning for recycling? New collection vehicles have recently been bought, but
despite the 18% recycling target, none are recycling vehicles! At a recent meeting,
we were told that this was so that if they stopped kerbside collection (of paper),
they could use the vehicles for normal collections!