Councillor talks rubbish in Easton

bristol | the environment | news report Thursday December 14, 2006 07:02 by woodsy

Last Monday a public meeting was organised at Easton Community Centre to discuss problems with rubbish and recycling in Easton.

At 10.00 am on Monday 11th December, Easton Residents' Network (ERN) and The Somali Voice organised a public meeting at Easton Community Centre with Cllr. Gary Hopkins and council officers to discuss rubbish, recycling and the cleanliness of Easton.

Despite publicity via local mailing lists and on Bristol Indymedia and perhaps due to the hour and the weather, very few local people turned out and only one local ward councillor, Sue O'Donnell, bothered to attend. Nevertheless, points raised from the floor did seem to astonish the assembled council officers, whose one size fits all city-wide waste and recycling system clearly was an uncomfortable fit in an area as diverse as Easton.

Jim Carpenter, Chair of ERN, introduced Cllr. Hopkins, who gave a brief presentation on the new waste management scheme and the reasons for its introduction. He mentioned the detrimental effect on the city's coffers of having to pay landfill tax for disposing of rubbish, stating that due to recycling, Bristol had since August saved £1.5 mn. in landfill tax and was now doing a nice trade in selling its unwanted landfill permits. However, he also came out with the wild claim that recycling was helping to stop global warming! For your information Cllr. Hopkins, not dumping rubbish in landfill does cut down on methane production – as you correctly mentioned – but composting does involve the production of carbon dioxide, another well-known greenhouse gas. I also fail to see how sending food waste out of the area by fossil-fuelled trucks helps save the planet. However, that's enough brickbats for our elected official for the nonce, he did point out one positive development: Bristol's recycling rate had gone from 12% to 39% of all waste in 12 months, but claimed the system introduced by the council was “designed to make it easier to recycle”. Towards the end of his presentation, he moved onto fly tipping, stating businesses were responsible for dumping a large number of black bags in the street. It later transpired that all fly-tipped rubbish is now sifted for clues as to its origin, so there may actually be some substantiation for this claim.

Next came a brief contribution from Abdi and Kayse of The Somali Voice newspaper. They told us that Bristol's Somali population was now about 20,000 and that rates of recycling were very low, in the region of 1%, since the whole notion of recycling was completely novel to them. The Somali Voice, a bilingual monthly newspaper, was trying its best to help its readers understand the scheme and had featured recycling in its latest issue, which was now being avidly read by a certain senior councillor on the top table, after which he commented that the council “needed to communicate better”.

The Bangladesh Womens' Group then voiced their concerns the main one of which was that Bangladeshi families are great lovers of home cooking and thus produce lots of food waste. Consequently, they found the brown food waste bins provided by the council far too small. Another concern was the increase in rats, flies and maggots.

Immediately after this came Liz Jones deputising for Asian Health and Social Care Services. She informed the meeting that South Asian families typically had between 5-7 residents per household and therefore produced abnormally high levels of waste and specific kinds of waste (e.g. large edible oil cans), which the recycling crews did not realise they were supposed to collect. Once again the small size of the council's bins came in for criticism.

In response to these last 2 contributions, Gary Hopkins stated that extra brown bins could be supplied upon request, as could jumbo wheelie bins. There was an immediate riposte from the floor: “Where are we supposed to put all these extra bins then? There's no room on the pavements anyway?”. The councillor had no real response to this. He then moved onto the large empty oil cans. This prompted another interjection from the front row of the public: “Why don't you run your rubbish trucks on bio-diesel?” “Because of warranty issues”, came a reply from one of the council officers at the back. “Well change your suppliers”, came the riposte. A short and slightly heated dialogue of the deaf then ensued, proving that the 'not invented here' syndrome prevalent in the past in local authorities is still alive and well and living at the Counts Louse.

Janet Deverell of Neighbourhood Renewal came along with a few points from Redfield, which also had implications for the wider area. The chief point she raised was that it only takes one household in a street not to recycle and produce huge volumes of waste to have a detrimental effect and annoy all the neighbours. Once again the question of producing materials in various languages was produced: clearly the 20 languages used for the council's leaflets are not enough, particularly in view of the East European influx.

The last brief presentation came from Environment Officer Karen Fielding, who reminded the meeting about the monthly Environmental Task Group meetings and the work of Grounds4Change, which is working with local residents, businesses and the council to improve the local environment.

The final salvo from the floor came from residents of the local tower blocks. These blocks, which house hundreds of families locally have either none or very minimal recycling facilities. Where they are provided, they usually take the form of a paltry 6 ordinary size wheelie bins per tower block. One contributor from the floor contrasted Bristol's attitude with that of Birmingham where tower block residents were the first to be encouraged to recycle. Once more Gary Hopkins promised something would be happening soon. As tower block residents have been told this for the last 5 years, they were not impressed – and they weren't alone.

Talking to council officers after the event, they seemed really amazed to find out that their scheme could be perceived as less than perfect, difficult to understand and hard to use. Clearly they hadn't done their homework before introducing it. Perhaps they ought to get out of the Counts Louse more.