Residents face being ‘re-educated’ about what can and cannot be recycled when council officers visit homes as part of a recycling crackdown.
Trained officers will visit homes on behalf of Caerphilly County Borough Council to remind residents what can be put in their recycling bins and bags.
The council has said it consistently exceeds Welsh Government recycling targets, but “contamination” issues mean that could be at risk.
To tackle the problem, the council has created a ‘seven recycling sin bins’ campaign to tell residents the cause major of problems.
These include nappies, pet excrement, electronics, textiles, food waste and hard plastics.
Cllr Nigel George, Cabinet Member for Community and Leisure Services said: “Over recent years, Caerphilly has consistently been among the best performing areas for recycling, and this is very much thanks to the sterling efforts of the majority of our residents.
“However, in moving forward we need to acknowledge that as a community, we need to do even more to ensure we can continue to meet the ambitious recycling targets set by Welsh Government.
“We recently held a consultation on recycling through our council newspaper Newsline, and the general comments we received from residents reiterated that while they do generally recycle, they would benefit from a reminder about what they can and cannot recycle.”
Good! Perhaps they can re-educate my mrs that wet wipes are not made of paper. I’m sick of taking them out of the recycling bin.
You could do the educating in your house, who needs the Council to do that?
I was just joking. Trying to keep it light, it can’t always be so serious.
Actually I learnt something from this article, a couple of months ago I put a broken sander in the recycling thinking it would be ok as its both plastic and metal with valuable copper in side. Now it seems that it would of been better to take it to the dump as they want neither hard plastics nor electrical items.
I take great pains to recycle every bit of waste including composting at home etc. so if I as a keen recycler didn’t know this and hadn’t thought to look it up perhaps these visits to the general public might be a worthwhile investment.
Plus they might get through to the Mrs when she won’t listen to me, I’m sure you know what that’s like, eh?
I am as puzzled as you are, Pete, regarding the rules on what can be put into the recycle bin. You can put in plastic bottles, cardboard, glass, etc which can be recycled, for sure, but have a low monetary value.
As you say an electrical item, containing valuable materials, is not allowed although you can put this in the bin for land fill. This does not seem right, the scrap men who tour around the neighbourhood picking up scrap will not look twice at cardboard but do like electric motors, etc, that do have a value.
The council is right to educate people on what is allowed because incorrect filling of bins costs us all money but surely they should also look at changing the policy on old machinery and scrap which are both recycleable and valuable.
When I read this article I remembered that the recycling dump has a section for electrical items and I have taken stuff there before now.
I suppose when I put the old sander in I also figured that its size was acceptable as I wouldn’t have put a Hoover in there, I would’ve taken that to the dump. Psychological I suppose.
You learn something new.
No, no idea what thats like.
Keeping it light, these people wont be handing out `advice` for long, before they issues fixed penalty notices to people who think, reasonable I happen to agree, they expect the Council to know plastic from metal, when they attempt to recycle electric hand tools, it has always been the rule of course that small elecrical items have to be taken to the recycling centres. What were you thinking?.
Oh yeah I remember.
Well this is my point Trev, I am very keen on recycling as I have mentioned and make sure that I do my utmost as I think it the right thing to do for many reasons that I won’t go into here as its a bigger story.
But there are many people who don’t care and only do it as we are obliged to do so. For them a gentle reminder (re-education sounds a bit Orwellian) might be quite useful. Considering that we haven’t been recycling in this area for that much time really, a bit more knowledge of what to do might be just the ticket. I’ve often thought that government could do a series of adverts just like the old safety adverts of yesteryear.
Perhaps they will when all council recycling depts are singing the same tune.
Let the train take the strain.
Clunk click every trip. etc
And we all listened to him, did`nt we?. The problem with that public service propoganda is we tend to listen to the messenger and not the message as the current huge rise in the number of people not wearing seat belts testifies.
Just keeping it light Pete, Any bright ideas on which public figure could promote such an important message as saving the planet?, Nigel whats is name from UKIP. Nick Clegg, he knows all about recycling this and that.
How about Tony Blair he’s been recycling the same old lies for years.
A few of us readers and contributors to this on line news media have been critical of the Editors processes in unbalanced reporting, today, the UKIP representative for the Caerphilly constituency has made similar complaints in respect to the report on these pages in respect to the by election in Bedwas, and the Candidates in that election, I consider the reporting to be more of a mistake rather than a deliberate attempt to push certain candidates to the front, First we had a complaint from Wayne David about the biased reporting of the election, then we had three regular contributors to these pages complaining, now we have the UKIP senior representive in the constituency complaining.
I posted a comment today `twice` after the first one was censored by the Editor, the second one was also censored, and removed. the comment was critical of Caerphilly Council, clearly a sensitive subject for the Editor and his reporter.
I can see nothing in THIS comment which should offend it is full of facts, so will the Editor please explain to all readers why he unilaterally CENSORS comments which are critical of the Caerphilly council? Why he feels that issues of public interest should be sanitised by him in the interest of the Borough Council?
No one except me and the Editor, and his reporter will know if this is pulled because you wont be able to see it, I aslo notice that any commments I now post are held unpublished until the Editor or his reporter has the opportunity to remove it before it is published, is this due to the comments I have made of the way this news media is operated?.