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by Lib Dem team on 9 August, 2011
New figures show just how far ahead the people of Stockport are in recycling – and thanks to your efforts, we’re saving millions of pounds.
Each Stockport household threw away 77kg of rubbish (the stuff that can’t be recycled and ends up in landfill) between January and March this year. We pay for all the rubbish that goes to landfill, so throwing away less rubbish means more money to spend on other services.
How does that compare to the rest of Greater Manchester?
The next best authority is Trafford, with 122kg – 59% more than us.
The least successful authorities are Salford, Bolton, Bury, Manchester and Wigan – households in those five areas each averaged sending over 150kg to landfill. The average in Wigan was 165kg – well over double the Stockport figure.
Stockport’s also way ahead on the percentage of household waste we send for recycling or composting.
For that January to March period, Stockport residents sent over 60% of our waste for recycling or composting. The next best in Greater Manchester is Trafford, with 42%. Bottom of the table is Bolton with just 21% of their waste going to recycling or composting.
But it gets better. For April to June this year, Stockport residents recycled or composted over 67% of waste! That’s great news for the environment and translates to millions of pounds being saved.
How can we do better still?
Stockport residents are doing a fantastic job – thank you.
6 Comments
“Aluminium foil goes in the brown bin, with bottles and cans – that includes cartons from take-aways.” *could*, be misconstrued to mean, *all*, take-away containers.
Regards
VK
Well done but I wish we could something about plastic bag recycling. I have to take mine to Sainsburys as they have the only facility I know of. Try as one might there is no avoiding plastic bags. Bread, pasta, veg, fruit, etc all come in them. Can’t our council do what Sainsburys are doing?
For those people I speak to, Stockports bin collections are a major source of irritation.
Traffords black land fill whellie bin is more than twice the size of our black wheelie bin and it’s empied every week, thats four times the obviously fettered facility we have.
Further Trafford is responding to its residents needs and providing an excellent service to its residents rather than being in any way inferior to Stockport as this piece implies.
As a result of this situation I have to make regular trips to the tip to get rid of land fill waste. Many others do the same and don’t like it. If this forced land fill was included how would Stockports figures look then?
Being top of these targets no doubt makes Stockport’s point scoring look good (and no doubt gives good bonus’s to our well paid and very well pensioned council staff ) but it costs me time and money – something I am already paying throgh the nose for with the highest council tax in Greater Manchester in terms of what we actually pay to the council.
Being top of the rankings saves you money -or at least means your council tax goes further. Every tonne that goes to landfill costs taxpayers money, every tonne that goes to recycling makes us money.
Trafford’s service costs their taxpayers a lot more than ours does – which is one reason Trafford is sending people to Stockport to see how we do it.
It’s fairly easy to see what effect people making special trips to the tip is having – go along and see what percentage the tips are recycling.
Before we started the new service, Longley Lane was recycling or composting about 43%; that fell to about 35% but is now over 50%.
Of course, where people do really need a second black bin, they’re able to get one.
As a household of just the two of us we find the system of recycling very good. However, with our daughter being away on holiday and us living in the same area, we had the job of putting her bins out. They are a family of 5 with two extra guests staying in the two weeks prior to their holdiay. The black bin was ovrerflowing and I noticed very many black bins in the area overflowing. The bin men were late collecting last Wednesday and when I went to their house to take the bins back in I noticed on route that all overflowing bins had been emptied but the bin men had thrown the black bin bag into the drive and just emptied the far too small bin. They have tried to obtain another bin by filling in the necessary form to no avail. If you want to prevent fly-tipping provide suitable bins for families. At least the rubbish was in a bag and presented in a tidy fashion and did not deserve to be TIPPED onto the property!!!
Non-recyclable supermarket fruit and veg containers – those are the bugbears – hard to avoid supermarkets if you work full time.
For every family needing more space there are single people whose garden is full of empty bins paying council tax for having them emptied every once in a while – it’s just one of those things.