The carrot and stick of recycling

To restrict or to educate?

Recently my local council letter dropped our area to tell us that they were changing our bin pickup schedule - reducing general waste from a 2 weekly service to a 3 weekly service. The reasoning behind this was to ‘encourage’ residents to recycle more, apparently up to 60% of waste in the general bins is recyclable.

Encouraging people to recycle is a noble act, no doubt about it, but I can’t help but think that this approach - restricting other waste pickup services - is going to end up backfiring without en effort to provide more education on recycling first.

The city I live in isn’t very clean. Near my local area there’s a depressing amount of fly tipping, dog mess, broken glass and litter - pretty much all the time. All I can assume is that some people just don’t care about the place they call home.

It is with the people who don’t care that I think these changes will affect the most. There’s a good chance that if you don’t clean up after your dog you’re not going to be too bothered about recycling. If your bin starts being emptied less frequently will this encourage you to split out your recycling or just put the excess rubbish out on the street or back close? Compounding this is the fact that bulky item uplifts are now being charged for and the recycling centres are closed to all but ‘essential’ waste (what is essential waste?!).

I hope I’m wrong and this turns things around, I really do.