More from Councillor Parker, extra bins all round!

Councillor Gary Parker has emailed me again. I had not got around to replying to his last email so it's nice to see that he is following up on the bin situation.

Fingers crossed I'll be able to get respond to this soon...

Here's the Councillors email anyway:

Dear CA, I have now checked with officers on some of the points you have raised, in summary these are detailed below:

• We appreciate the support you continue to give to the Council's recycling and composting efforts.


• The scheme so far has increased the borough's recycling and composting rate to around 43%


• For the last 2 years Greenwich Council has sent less waste to landfill than any other local authority in England.


• We continue to work with residents who have difficulties in operating the scheme and continue to make progress. Since February this year the proportion of bins requiring follow up collections has reduced from around 17% to 5%.


• The introduction of a third bin for residual waste should further improve the situation. The reason for this is it will assist those who are reluctant to place residual waste in black sacks. Typically this means putting plastic in the green and kitchen waste bin and food waste into the dry recycling bin. We will review our approach to residents and our collection arrangements once the bin delivery programme has been completed.


• Costs for other associated services- new black bins, additional collection etc are being met through allocated funding in this years budget.

My additional comments are as follows:

• In some local authority areas in England collections have been reduced to once every two weeks, leading to protests by local residents, yet we have increased collections, significantly addressed landfill issues and built a ‘state of the art’ recycling centre – all this without significant increases in the council tax


• We have increased the service and dramatically reduced landfill, improving the environment and saving the local council tax payer very significant sums of money- we send less waste to landfill than any other local authority in England, something we can all be proud of


• The council will look at collection arrangement and issues with individual residents once the new black bins are all delivered and we will continue with our education programme which includes, letters, leaflets, information on the councils website and interaction and events for local residents like the recent ‘Christmas Cracker’ event at Charlton House which attracted hundreds of local residents and at which incidentally, all local councillors were present ,representatives of all council departments, the mayor and various members of the councils executive were in attendance too


• We are not complacent about these issues and will continue to try and improve both waste collection and environmental services in the Charlton area

I am always interested in your comments and those of others, who post them on your blogspot and as I said in my previous email will be bring to your attention some further proposals for improving the local environment in due course.

Once again happy new year

Cllr Gary Parker