Bin the proposed rubbish charge 24 May 2007
Posted by Anders Hanson in Politics.Tags: Environment
3 comments
On the surface, charging households for the amount of rubbish they throw away sounds attractive as a way of encouraging people to recycle. But it makes me feel very uneasy for a number of reasons:
- How will it be measured? Will each bin have to be weighed before it is emptied in to the dustbin lorry? If so, that must be an expensive bit of kit that will be needed to ensure that the rubbish is weighed properly (where is the audit trail if someone questions they amount they are charged?) and then allocated to the correct property. This will also generate a massive bureaucracy to ensure that people are billed correctly.
- How can you be sure that the rubbish you are emptying belongs to that household? It is not unusual for people to put rubbish in other people’s bin if theirs is full, and this may well be done deliberately by people trying to avoid the charge. In my area, most bins look the same as each other - big, black, plastic and with wheels on the bottom. At the moment, it does not matter if the bins get mixed up as everyone’s is the same. That could become another source of neighbourly tension if each bin has to go back to a certain property.
- What do you do with communal bins? Where I live now, we have three large commercial metal bins between everyone in the development.
- Will this set a precedent of charging people for their services based on whether we view their personal habits as positive or not? For example, could we now decide to tax people who drive fast as there is more of a risk of an accident?
- Will this also begin the separation of services out with us being charged separately for everything we do, generating one massive new bureaucracy for us to pay for?
- Finally, and to me a huge concern, is that it may just generate more fly-tipping, which is even harder to control. This week Sheffield was revealed as having the third biggest problem with fly-tipping in the country, I can only assume it would get worse under this system.
Unlike fortnightly bin collections, which I think are less problematic than the perception as I had them myself for two years without any problems, this latest proposal sounds like the potential for a horrendous mess. There are plenty of other ways of cutting down on the amount of waste that is simply binned, that are much simpler and could potentially have the same benefit.
