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Talking Rubbish column: 3rd January
New Year resolutions are all about promising that you will do better in the next 12 months. The unspoken suggestion is that over the last year you could have done a little more to be good.
So let’s start 2008 by saying how well everyone did in 2007.
For instance people in Wiltshire recycled more than 38 percent of their household waste, compared to national figures of 31 percent.
We launched a popular campaign Love Food Hate Waste to stop the huge amount of food being thrown away.
Alongside this residents bought almost 2,000 food waste digesters which can take all sorts of unwanted food and either break it down or turn it into compost.
Around 80 per cent of the items taken to Household Recycling Centres were recycled instead of going to landfill.
Even more residents were given the opportunity to have kerbside black box collections so that over 95% of Wiltshire is now covered.
Among the initiatives introduced at the recycling centres were new methods to dispose of carpets and televisions.
Almost 400 tonnes of electronic equipment from Wiltshire are now being recycled every month.
You only have to go back a few years to find that almost all Wiltshire’s councils had quite low recycling rates. Now it is second nature for people to separate their paper, tins and glass for collection or take a trip to the Household Recycling Centre to drop off unwanted items.
Those good habits should mean that 2008 produces an ever better recycling performance in Wiltshire.
But there are areas we can improve and the Love Food Hate Waste campaign is a good example.
Around a third of the average household bin is made up of food waste. Some of that is unavoidable – vegetable peelings or the inedible bits from meat or fish. But some might be uneaten meals or items that have simply gone off.
Currently your council pays to send a truck (breathing out fumes) to collect this and bury it in the ground where it emits the greenhouse gas methane.
It’s hardly ideal.
So if we are doing pledges then let’s aim to make 2008 the year we stop binning so much food.
ENDS
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