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Crackdown on irresponsible
environmental crime in Liverpool
MAYOR of Liverpool Joe Anderson has
announced a drive to crackdown on illegal dumping and targeting residents that
do not recycle responsibly.
A report approved by Cabinet, on Friday, 17 February 2017, has recommended a number of steps
to improve the recycling rate of 33%. It includes the introduction of larger
recycling sacks, an expansion of weekly recycling services for City Centre
apartment blocks, piloting weekly recycling, work to repair and upgrade the 4
foot alleyways serving 28,000 terraced properties and doubling the number of
teams tackling flytipping.
In addition, the Mayor has asked for an emphasis on tackling residents who
choose not to recycle or manage their waste in a responsible way, or who let
their dogs foul the streets.
It is estimated that 21,000 tonnes of recyclable goods are needlessly going to
landfill each year because residents are placing it in a purple bin or black
sacks rather than the blue recycling bin. Every tonne of residual waste from the
purple bins costs twice as much to treat as recyclable waste, meaning an
additional bill of around ?1.2 million per year for Council Tax payers.
Mayor Anderson said:- "While we have made huge progress on improving
recycling over the last few years, responsible citizens are being undermined by
some residents who are putting waste in the wrong bin.
We recently had a case in Old Swan where an entire day's recycling collections
were so contaminated with non recyclable items that the load was rejected at the
recycling plant. Instead, it had to be sent to landfill, doubling the cost of
processing and disposing of the waste and hitting Council Tax payers in the
pocket. This example shows how the efforts of all the residents who do the right
thing can be undermined by the minority who choose not to.
We have a challenging recycling target of 55% to hit by 2020 and so we
have to think creatively about what we can do. Can we reward those residents
that let us know who is flytipping, whose dogs are fouling our streets and or
are not recycling properly? Should we look at making it compulsory to recycle?
We need to look seriously at these measures and more to encourage and reward
civic pride. I have asked Officers to come up with a series of enforcement
measures that we can use to drive the required change in behaviour in those
residents that fail to responsibly manage their waste and for the Cabinet member
to bring a report setting out in detail the steps we will take to tackle poor
waste management and other environmental crime."
RECYCLING IN NUMBERS:-
► 33% of waste is recycled in Liverpool (2016/17)
► The 18,000 tonnes of green waste collected
(2016/17)
► The 21,000 tonnes of recyclable items wrongly placed in the purple bins,
every year.
► The 28,000 houses who receive a weekly black sack
collection.
► The 196,000 houses who are receiving an alternate weekly collection of
purple and blue bins. |
